Paris Art Week 2026: Your Ultimate Guide to Art Basel, Design Miami, and Beyond

What to See Across Paris During Art Basel Paris 2026

Paris enters its busiest art and design week with a program that looks as much to what has already existed as to what comes next. Across museums, galleries, historic buildings, and temporary spaces, the 2026 season brings together fashion archives, modernist furniture, contemporary sculpture, photography, craft, and experimental forms of hospitality, with many projects reconsidering how objects and images acquire meaning over time.

At the center of the week, Art Basel Paris returns to the Grand Palais while Design Miami.Paris takes over the Hôtel de Maisons. Beyond the fairs, museums and cultural spaces across Paris present projects that span art, fashion, architecture, and design: Ibrahim Mahama brings a network of artists and Ghanaian cultural histories to Fondation Cartier; Prune Nourry revisits the overlooked legacy of women sculptors at the Petit Palais; Jenny Holzer activates the Musée d’Orsay with texts and images; and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs marks 40 years of its fashion collections through four decades of exhibitions and 40 significant silhouettes.

Galleries turn to material memory and transformation, from Jean Prouvé’s architecture and Japanese ceramics to Wendy Andreu’s reworked furniture and Ais’s layered paintings. Temporary projects also blur the boundaries between disciplines, including WE ARE ONA’s collaboration with Rirkrit Tiravanija and chef Dalad Kambhu, where a shared meal becomes part of the artwork itself. From major institutional exhibitions to intimate gallery presentations, collectible design, food, and temporary interventions, this is designboom’s guide to what to see across Paris during Art Basel Paris and Design Miami.Paris 2026.

Art Basel Paris 2026

Art Basel Paris returns to the Grand Palais from October 23rd to 25th, 2026, with its fifth edition that brings together 211 galleries from 41 countries and regions, while expanding beyond the fair through an extensive public program across Paris. Under new director Karim Crippa, the edition foregrounds the galleries, museums, institutions, and public spaces of the city as part of the fair’s wider cultural context.

The fair is organized across three sectors: Galeries, with 183 exhibitors; Emergence, with 16 solo presentations; and Premise, with 12 historically focused projects. This year, Premise moves into the larger Salon Seine, while Conversations relocates to the Grand Palais Auditorium for the first time. A record 12 joint booths will also bring together 24 galleries.

Outside the Grand Palais, the Public Program spreads across nine Parisian venues, including the Petit Palais, Palais d’Iéna, Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Beaux-Arts de Paris, and several public squares and gardens. Highlights include Alice Diop’s Geste de Consolation at Palais d’Iéna, Tracey Emin’s sculptures at the Parvis des Droits-de-l’Homme, Kutluğ Ataman’s Küba at Beaux-Arts de Paris, and Robert Indiana’s LOVE Wall at Place Clemenceau.

what: Art Basel Paris 2026
when: October 23rd–25th, 2026
where: Grand Palais, 3 Avenue du Général Eisenhower, 75008 Paris

Alice Diop – Geste de Consolation presented by Miu Miu

For her first exhibition project, French filmmaker Alice Diop transforms the Palais d’Iéna into a multimedia journey for Miu Miu’s 2026 Art Basel Paris Public Program commission. Geste de Consolation brings together film, photography, sculpture, poetry, dance, music, and live performance, centering acts of consolation conceived by Black women artists.

The project takes over four interconnected spaces. It begins with work by South African artist Zanele Muholi and a two-screen video installation by Diop, bringing together archival images and film excerpts that have shaped her own way of looking. This leads into Chambre à soi, a living room and library featuring carpets with a motif by Mary Lee Bendolph and books drawn from Diop’s intellectual influences. The central library opens onto a performance space where texts by writers including Penda Diouf, Zora Neale Hurston, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Marie Ndiaye, and Zadie Smith are performed live. Choreography by Nadia Beugré and music by Angel Bat Dawid and her ensemble further extend the project beyond the conventions of a static exhibition. The journey ends with Simone Leigh’s monumental bronze Sentinel (Mami Wata), whose nearly five-meter-tall female figure references the West African water spirit whose image has travelled across Africa and its diasporas.

what: Alice Diop – Geste de Consolation
when: October 21st–25th, 2026
where: Palais d’Iéna, Paris

Tracey Emin brings three bronze figures to Paris

Presented by White Cube, Tracey Emin’s I Lay Here For You, I Followed You to the End, and I Will Not Be Alone occupy the Parvis des Droits de l’Homme outside the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine. The three bronze figures explore intimacy, vulnerability, and resilience through different poses of the female body. The works move from an elongated figure lying on the ground to a kneeling body and, finally, an upright seated figure, tracing, together, a shift from exposure and surrender toward strength and endurance.

what: I Lay Here For You, I Followed You to the End, I Will Not Be Alone
when: October 14th – November 1st, 2026
where: Parvis des Droits de l’Homme, Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris

Artworks take over Avenue Winston Churchill

Avenue Winston Churchill becomes an outdoor setting for works by Marcello Maloberti, Yinka Shonibare, Simone Fattal, Niki de Saint Phalle, Manfred Pernice, Alicja Kwade, Carmen Herrera, and Keita Miyazaki. The free-access program places sculpture and installation directly within the public realm, from monumental stone forms and concrete benches to neon, bronze, and recycled materials.

Marcello Maloberti’s CIEL suspends the French word for ‘sky’ 20 meters above the avenue, written upside down as if addressed to the sky rather than viewers below. Nearby, Yinka Shonibare’s Abstract Bronze VIII transforms a twisted bronze form with hand-painted Dutch wax patterns, while Simone Fattal’s Door takes the form of a weathered architectural fragment held together by long metal nails.

The selection also includes Niki de Saint Phalle’s colorful Cat Head Totem, Manfred Pernice’s four concrete benches in bank-group, and Alicja Kwade’s L’Élévation des Mondes, a precarious tower of ten polished stone spheres sourced from different parts of the world. Carmen Herrera’s geometric Angulo Amarillo and Keita Miyazaki’s A Symbiotic Form, made from salvaged car parts and pleated Japanese paper, extend the presentation into abstraction, material transformation, and ideas of fragility.

what: Outdoor art program on Avenue Winston Churchill
when: October 20th – 25th, 2026
where: Avenue Winston Churchill, Paris