Paris Gallery Weekend marks a decade of progress
Event’s tenth-anniversary edition celebrated resilience of city’s art trade
Paris Gallery Weekend was structured around seven walks that featured more than 100 participating commercial galleries and non-commercial institutions. Photo: Francesca Avanzinelli
“It’s a party!” exclaims Florence Bonnefous, a board member of Paris Gallery Weekend and a co-founder of suburban Romainville’s tastemaking Air de Paris gallery, of the former’s tenth-anniversary edition. Staged from 24-26 May, the event featured more than 100 participating commercial galleries and non-commercial institutions in and around the French capital, offering visitors access to art and artists from around the world. The programme celebrated not only the Parisian art trade’s growth but also its endurance amid numerous existential challenges.
“I’m proud that we’ve lasted this long,” says Marion Papillon, the founding president of Paris Gallery Weekend and the owner of Galerie Papillon. “It takes a lot of energy to bring galleries together, and a lot of time to allow an event like ours to stand out in the cultural calendar of Paris.”
Paris Gallery Weekend has undergone significant changes in the past decade. Although it is now a city-spanning exploration of dealerships and institutions, the first edition, staged in 2014, consisted of a single group show of artists nominated by their respective galleries. This year’s iteration retained something of that initial concept through an initiative called Cartes Blanches, in which a dozen dealers invited curators to organise exhibitions of whatever they desired in their galleries.
Since 2018, however, Paris Gallery Weekend has been defined by its organisation around “gallery walks”: routes designed to guide visitors to groupings of spaces within neighbourhoods whose density of art offerings might otherwise feel overwhelming. Among the seven gallery walks featured in the event’s purple map of Paris this year, four were situated in the Marais, which has become the heart of the city’s primary market. Together, the quartet could be combined to form a circuitous route from the Place de la République to the Île-Saint-Louis that connected around 55 participating galleries—nearly double the citywide number that took part in the inaugural Paris Gallery Weekend.
