The 12 best gallery shows in Paris in October 2026

More than twenty large-scale paintings, their surfaces built up with paint, embedded fragments of canvas and burnished gold and turquoise, on metamorphosis and classical myth. Kiefer has worked in and around Paris for more than thirty years, and Ropac’s former boiler factory in Pantin is the one gallery in the region that can hang paintings this size as a single installation; the effect is closer to a museum wing than a show.

It closes on October 25, two days after Art Basel Paris opens, so it is the show to see in the first weeks of the month. David Salle’s Venice paintings open in the same building on October 21. Pantin is half an hour from the Marais on line 5.

Thirteen late sculptures in stoneware, stone and steel, made in 2003–04 after Caro (1924–2013) worked with the ceramicist Hans Spinner near Grasse, which brought clay into a body of work known for welded steel. The pieces suggest fragments of landscape and of the body without ever becoming literal; the largest, Witness, nearly three meters across, seems to rise from the floor. The series is named for Kenwood House in London, where it was first shown, and has rarely been seen in Europe since.

At Templon’s rue du Grenier-Saint-Lazare space, by the Pompidou, through October 24. Robin Kid’s Permanent Display, in the rue Beaubourg gallery around the corner, runs to October 31.

About thirty works on paper Twombly made in the summer of 1959 in Sperlonga, the coastal village south of Rome where the ruins of Tiberius’s villa and its Odyssey sculptures had been unearthed two years before. Rather than describing the horizon, he suggests it with sparse marks, patches of paint and wide stretches of bare paper: lines, numbers, circles and near-cartographic signs in thick touches and light impasto. The drawings mark the turn toward landscape that would run through the rest of his career.

Karsten Greve gave Twombly his first exhibition with the gallery in 1971, and this is the kind of focused historical show the Marais does best. On rue Debelleyme, opposite Ropac, through November 10.

The first solo exhibition of Krasner’s work ever held in France, presented with Olney Gleason and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. It takes a decade of experiment and reinvention, when she worked at unprecedented scale and with restricted palettes, sometimes straight from the tube, in the Umber paintings and the Primary Series, and builds to Comet (1966–70), lent by the foundation, with gouaches from 1969.

The show opens on October 19 with a reception from 6 to 8 pm, ahead of Art Basel Paris and alongside the Metropolitan Museum’s Krasner and Pollock exhibition in New York, and runs to December 18 on rue de Ponthieu, off the Champs-Élysées.

Casteel’s first exhibition in France: new portraits, landscapes and flower paintings, all made in the first half of 2026 in a cool, earthy palette inspired by winter light, on dormancy and renewal, hope and grief. The portraits range from family and friends to strangers, with a new picture from her Subway Series; several of the flowers come from her garden in the Hudson Valley, and the title also hints at “son”, after the birth of her child.

The Marais gallery opens especially on Monday, October 19, for the opening from 6 to 8 pm; the show runs to December 23, with a catalogue essay by Amandine Nana of the Palais de Tokyo. In the same building, Günther Uecker’s Verletztes Feld runs to October 31.

New paintings by Murillo at Zwirner’s rue Vieille du Temple gallery, announced by the gallery with the artist’s own statement in place of an explanation: a list of associations running from the speed of flight, the sea and terrain to labor, repetition, crowds, marks and scars, and places from Colombia and Cameroon to the Philippines, Poland and Germany, ending by calling the collective a field of spirits.

Murillo’s large, layered canvases and his social projects have made him one of the most discussed painters of his generation, and this is his Paris show for the fair. From October 19 to December 19.

A two-artist exhibition pairing Tacita Dean and Bruce Nauman, both long represented by Marian Goodman and both artists for whom time, the studio and the act of recording are the subject itself. Dean has filmed Nauman at work before; the pairing in the gallery’s courtyard hôtel on rue du Temple should be one of the Marais’s quieter, more serious shows of the week.

From October 19 to December 19. Max Hetzler, across the street, opens Elmgreen & Dragset the same evening.

Small bronzes and new paintings on desire, forbidden love and the anguish that comes with them, building on Emin’s 2024 exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey. The works weave in the autobiographical: figures in the throes of becoming, scenes from her home in Margate with her cats, and her experience of life-threatening illness and loss. It follows her Tate Modern survey, which travels to the Louisiana Museum in Denmark in October.

The show opens on October 20 with a preview on the evening of October 19, from 5 to 8 pm, and runs to December 18 on avenue Matignon. The gallery closes for lunch, from 12:30 to 1:30.