5 Must-See Shows from Paris Gallery Weekend
The seventh edition of Paris Gallery Weekend took place this past weekend, a month and a half later than in previous years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sixty participating galleries presenting 72 exhibitions are spread across four neighborhoods or, one could say, three temporalities. Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Marais, the 8th arrondissement, and Pantin-Romainville symbolically represent the past, present, and future of the Parisian art market.
Before and after World War II, Saint-Germain was the stomping grounds for artists and intellectuals: the likes of Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, and the activist political-cultural couples de Beauvoir–Sartre and Triolet-Aragon. By the 1950s, it was the theater for daring experiments in abstract, kinetic, and optical art in spaces run by intrepid female gallerists Iris Clert and Denise René. Today, the Marais is the hip epicenter of Paris’s gallery scene, which explains why four of the seven proposed gallery weekend crawls take place here. Home to numerous boutiques and cafés as well as the city’s historic LGBTQI+ neighborhood, the Marais has come a long way from the slum it was at the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, it was so insalubrious that in the 1920s, Le Corbusier proposed bulldozing and replacing it with 18 gigantic skyscrapers capable of housing 3 million people.
