ARTCOLLECTORNEWS Picks: The Top Exhibitions to See During Art Basel Paris 2025

Paris this fall is a playground for painting, abstraction, minimalism, and sculptural experimentation. Between David Zwirner, Almine Rech, Gagosian, Thaddaeus Ropac, and the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, the city is hosting a series of exhibitions that range from human figures in extremis to monumental minimalism and chaotic assemblage. Together, they illustrate the breadth, ambition, and vitality of contemporary and modern art in dialogue with history. For visitors attending Paris+ par Art Basel 2025, these exhibitions are the top shows to see, recommended by AARTCOLLECTORNEWS

George Rouy – SHADOWING, Almine Rech

Oct 25 — Nov 23, 2025 | Château de Boisgeloup, Gisors, France

Almine Rech transforms Pablo Picasso’s historic sculpture studio at the Château de Boisgeloup into a stage for George Rouy’s daring exploration of the human body. SHADOWING positions Rouy as a leading voice among a new generation of international artists, confronting desire, alienation, and crisis with unflinching intensity. His figures—sometimes solitary, sometimes enmeshed in amorphous crowds—oscillate between stillness and momentum, absorption and incitement. Themes of figure and phantom, landscape and anatomy, faces and masks are woven through each composition, creating a vocabulary of painting that is visceral, precise, and unpredictable. In the evocative setting of Picasso’s studio, Rouy’s canvases do more than echo history—they enter into a dialogue with it, casting contemporary anxieties against a backdrop of modernist experimentation. Supported by Hannah Barry Gallery and Hauser & Wirth, this is a highlight of Paris+ week and a must-see for collectors and art enthusiasts alike.

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Gerhard Richter, David Zwirner,

October 20—December 20, 2025 | Rue Vieille du Temple, Paris

Richter’s exhibition at David Zwirner offers a concise yet formidable survey of a career that continues to interrogate perception, materiality, and abstraction. Opening just days after a major retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton curated by Nicholas Serota and Dieter Schwarz, the show spans blurred photorealistic oils, layered abstractions, and reflective glass installations. Works such as Blumen (1992) and Torso (1997) exemplify Richter’s signature technique: photographs transformed into painterly ambiguity, hovering between recognition and dissolution. Meanwhile, his abstract paintings—like the 2001 Abstrakte Bilder pulsing with pinks, greens, and golds—and a massive 2024 Strip painting, digitally derived from previous abstractions, explore painting’s materiality and iterative possibilities. Richter balances chance and control, iteration and invention, producing works that feel perpetually alive. This exhibition reaffirms why, even after six decades, Richter remains one of the most vital voices in contemporary art and is a highlight of Paris Art Basel 2025.

Walter De Maria – The Singular Experience, Gagosian Le Bourget

October 19, 2025–April 18, 2026

At Gagosian Le Bourget, Walter De Maria’s The Singular Experience delivers monumental minimalism and rare posthumous insight into the artist’s vision. Curated by Donna De Salvo of the Dia Art Foundation, the show centers on De Maria’s last work, Truck Trilogy (2011–17), completed posthumously according to the artist’s own instructions. The installation features three stripped-down Chevrolet pickup trucks, each fitted with upright stainless-steel rods—a clear nod to the meditative geometry of The Lightning Field (1977). The work juxtaposes industrial ruggedness with geometric rigor, creating an austere yet quietly humorous meditation on scale, repetition, and space. Previously exhibited only in New York, the trilogy’s Paris appearance is a rare opportunity for European audiences to engage with De Maria’s late vision. Complementing the trucks, several of his pieces appear in the concurrent group exhibition Minimal at the Bourse de Commerce, offering further context for his enduring influence on land art and minimalist sculpture.

In Paris this autumn, bodies, color, scale, scrap metal, and elemental materials converge, reminding visitors that contemporary art remains an arena of surprise, rigor, and relentless creativity.

Robert Rauschenberg – Gluts, Thaddaeus Ropac, Marais

20 October—22 November 2025

Rauschenberg’s centenary is marked at Thaddaeus Ropac’s Marais location, opening almost exactly 100 years after his birth on October 22, 1925. The gallery celebrates the occasion with a notable first: the French debut of his Gluts series, the artist’s final sculptural project. Composed of cacophonous assemblages of scrap metal—exhaust pipes, bicycle frames, radiator grilles—these works are almost creature-like in form, reflecting both a response to the 1980s oil glut that devastated Texas and the urban decay Rauschenberg witnessed in Houston’s scrapyards, closed businesses, and gutted factories. The Gluts combine historical consciousness, social critique, and playful chaos, revealing Rauschenberg’s enduring capacity to turn industrial detritus into something visually and conceptually electrifying.

“Minimal”, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection

8 October 2025 - 19 January 2026

Curated by Jessica Morgan, Director of Dia Art Foundation

The Bourse de Commerce continues the season with Minimal, which opened on October 8, 2025, and runs through January 20, 2026. This sweeping survey presents over a hundred works tracing the diversity of Minimalist and post-minimal practices since the 1960s. Unlike traditional narratives of the movement, the exhibition foregrounds women, artists of color, and creators from Asia, South America, and Europe, offering alternative perspectives within the Minimalist canon. Highlights include works by Meg Webster, Senga Nengudi, Melvin Edwards, and figures from Japan’s Mono-ha movement such as Lee Ufan, Kishio Suga, and Jiro Takamatsu. These artists use unaltered materials to interrogate the essence of reality, emphasizing material, space, and process over representation. The exhibition underscores how minimalism can be both rigorous and poetic, formal yet subtly political, offering Paris audiences a rare chance to engage with a truly global view of the movement.

The Bourse is already preparing for its next exhibition, Clair-obscur, opening March 4, 2026, which promises to transform the museum into a luminous twilight landscape featuring works by Victor Man, Bill Viola, and Pierre Huyghe, signaling that Paris’s autumn season will ripple into a winter of light, shadow, and spectacle.

Taken together, these exhibitions reveal the multiplicity of contemporary and modern practice today. Rouy wrestles with corporeal energy, Richter interrogates perception and abstraction, De Maria elevates industrial forms into meditative spectacle, Rauschenberg transforms scrap into sculptural poetry, and Minimal offers a global reconsideration of the movement’s formal and political possibilities.

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Cover image: Courtesy of PINAULT COLLECTION