Featured Events in Paris in April 2025 (May Updated)

In the Spring of 2025, Fondation is inviting David Hockney, one of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, to take over the entire building for an exhibition that will be exceptional in its scale and its originality. The exhibition, which will be held from 9 April to 1 September 2025, will bring together more than 400 of his works (from 1955 to 2025) including paintings from international, institutional, and private collections, as well as works from the artist’s own studio and Foundation. There will be works in a variety of media including oil and acrylic painting, ink, pencil and charcoal drawing, digital art (works on iPhone, iPad, photographic drawings…) and immersive video installations.

As a palace of French classical art, the Louvre will open its doors to fashion for the first time and hold its first fashion-themed exhibition in history in 2025, displaying the museum's art treasures alongside classic fashion works and works by young designers. The exhibition will display 65 classic fashions, 30 high-end accessories and dozens of works by contemporary young designers in a space of 9,000 square meters, engaging in dialogue with the art from the Byzantine to the Second French Empire period treasured by the Louvre. Hundreds of fashion works resonate with the historical style and cultural connotation of decorative art in an academic, moving and poetic way, illustrating the real close connection between fashion and decoration. Important exhibits include fashion designed by Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel and masterpieces by well-known fashion brands such as Yohji Yamamoto. At the same time, a special tribute is paid to Parisian fashion pioneer Ms. Marie-Louise Carven.

From January 17 to June 30, 2025, the Galerie du Patrimoine, located in the boutique at 20, place Vendôme, in Paris, is hosting the exhibition “Nuances de Bleu par Van Cleef & Arpels”. A selection bringing together nearly 60 jewelry and watch creations from the Heritage Collection and nine original archives, offers an immersion into the heart of the blue palette deployed by the House since its founding in 1906.

At the invitation of the Musée national Picasso-Paris, Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca (b. 1961) has created a site-specific work in the chapel of the Hôtel Salé. Since his intervention at the Venice Biennale in 2007, Kuitca has developed a new language, echoing the architecture, which the artist calls ‘cubistoid painting’, in which a set of intersecting lines, like so many folds in the plane, is deployed directly on the walls, forming a new pictorial space.

L'Atelier des Lumières takes us into the rich and iconic world of Pablo Picasso, the essential artist of the 20th century. From February 14 to June 29, 2025, don't miss the exhibition Picasso, Art in Motion. Considered one of the fathers of modern art, he revolutionized the art world of the 20th century. Loved and hated alike, Pablo Picasso and his works leave no one indifferent. L'Atelier des Lumières is devoting a major exhibition to the Spanish painter and sculptor, from February 14 to June 29, 2025.Breaking all the codes and stylistic rules of the time, Picasso wanted to reinvent his way of seeing reality, representing it and magnifying it. Particularly renowned for his work on cubism, the artist left an indelible mark on the art world. The Picasso, Art in Motion exhibition plunges us into the many works of this painter, who was also a sculptor, engraver, ceramist and theater designer...

From the creation of the journal Présence Africaine to Revue Noire, "Paris Noir" traces the presence and influence of Black artists in France from the 1940s to the 2000s. The exhibition highlights 150 African and Afro-descendant artists, from Africa to the Americas, whose works have often never been shown in France. All contributed to a cosmopolitan Paris—a place of resistance and creativity—that fostered a wide variety of practices, from identity awareness to the search for transcultural artistic languages. Their impact is particularly significant in the redefinition of modernities and postmodernities.The exhibition explores half a century of struggles for emancipation, from African independence movements to the fall of apartheid, including battles against racism in France.

In the Spring of 2025, Fondation is inviting David Hockney, one of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, to take over the entire building for an exhibition that will be exceptional in its scale and its originality. The exhibition, which will be held from 9 April to 1 September 2025, will bring together more than 400 of his works (from 1955 to 2025) including paintings from international, institutional, and private collections, as well as works from the artist’s own studio and Foundation. There will be works in a variety of media including oil and acrylic painting, ink, pencil and charcoal drawing, digital art (works on iPhone, iPad, photographic drawings…) and immersive video installations.

The Musée du Louvre marks a European first with a major exhibition on the Mamluk sultanate (1250–1517), aiming to address this golden age of the Islamic Near East in all its scope and richness by examining it from a transregional perspective. The Mamluks, freed slave-soldiers of primarily Turkish (and later Caucasian) origin, built their legend on their warrior prowess. From 1250 to 1517, the Mamluk sultanate conquered the last bastions of the Crusaders, fought and repulsed the Mongol threat, survived Timur’s invasions and kept its threatening Turkmen and Ottoman neighbours at bay before succumbing to the latter’s expansionism. It encompassed a vast territory including Egypt, Bilad al-Sham (Syria, Libya, Israel/Palestine, Jordan), part of eastern Anatolia and the Hejaz region of Arabia, which includes Mecca and Medina. But the history of the Mamluk sultanate cannot be reduced to its conquests and feats of arms. Its culture, as complex and multifaceted as its society, was part of a little-known and singularly fluid medieval era. A world in which sultans mingled with emirs and rich civil elites, all actively engaged in artistic patronage. A pluralistic society in which women as well as Christian and Jewish minorities had a place. Another ‘Middle Kingdom’ where Europe, Africa and Asia converged and in which people and ideas circulated, as did merchandise and artistic repertoires. Structured in five sections (the Mamluks, their society, their cultures, their connections with the rest of the world and their art), the exhibition presents nearly 260 works, a third of which are from the Louvre and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, featured beside prestigious national and international loans. Textiles, objets d’art, manuscripts, paintings, ivories, stone and wood interior décors reveal a teeming artistic, literary, religious and scientific world. The sultanate was then the cultural heart of the Arab world and the heir to a number of grand traditions. Mamluk visual culture would make a lasting impression on art and architectural history. The exhibition, through a spectacular scenography, immersive spaces and varied layouts, invites visitors into a living experience of the world of the Mamluks. Visitors will also be introduced to historical figures representative of Mamluk society, telling their unique stories as part of the greater history. This is an unprecedented opportunity to discover this glorious and yet little-known empire through masterpieces from around the world, providing a new perspective on medieval Egypt and the Near East, at a time when it stood at a cultural junction between Asia, Africa and Europe.

The Louvre’s Department of Near Eastern Antiquities is hosting ten major works from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art is currently closed for renovation. The Louvre and The Met have created a unique dialogue between these two collections, which is displayed in the Louvre’s permanent galleries. These ‘special guest’ artworks from The Met, dating from between the late 4th millennium BC and the 5th century AD, show some remarkable connections with the Louvre’s collection. In some cases, a pair of objects has been reunited for the first time, while in others, pieces complement each other by virtue of specific historical features of their respective collections. Representing Central Asia, Syria, Iran and Mesopotamia, this dialogue between collections is (re)introducing visitors to these extraordinary, age-old works of art and the stories they tell.

The Centre Pompidou dedicates a monograph to Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938), an iconic and bold artist, one of the most important of her generation. On the fringes of the dominant movements of her time—cubism and abstract art were emerging while she ardently advocated for the necessity of painting the real—she placed the nude, both female and male, at the center of her work, depicting bodies without artifice or voyeurism.

This exhibition reviews the prosperity and integration of natural science and natural painting under the rule of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612). Rudolf II was an avid lover of art and science. Under his encouragement, a large number of European scientists and artists gathered at the Prague court to jointly promote the development of new research and new ideas. The first part of the exhibition presents the intersection of science and art. At the court of Rudolf II, scientists carried ancient knowledge and used new methods of observation, experimentation, research and measurement to explore nature; at the same time, artists used scientific observation perspectives and depiction techniques to use their brushes to establish artistic archives for the animals and plants around them. The second part focuses on how natural research stimulated the innovation of Prague's artistic creation, and how artists developed new techniques, perspectives and ideas under the joint action of plein-airism and scientific research.

The Musée d'Orsay's exhibition devoted to Norwegian artist Christian Krohg is the artist's first-ever retrospective outside Scandinavia, following several exhibitions in Oslo and Lillehammer in 2012, and Copenhagen in 2014. By highlighting Krohg's naturalistic and committed works, the museum offers a new perspective on Norwegian art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Gagosian presents an exhibition of new paintings by Julie Curtiss. It is the artist’s first solo exhibition with Gagosian, and in Paris.In her acrylic and oil compositions, Curtiss distills the familiar into enigmatic scenes, transforming seemingly banal moments through exaggerated forms, saturated color, and rich textures. Her figures, faceless or seen in fragments, are frozen in dreamlike pauses, amplifying a sense of unease. Drawing inspiration from Jungian psychoanalysis, Curtiss synthesizes her surreal visions into images that explore the clash between anima and animus, nature and nurture. She juxtaposes signifiers of domesticity with allusions to the shadow selves and animalistic drives that pulse beneath her subjects’ skins.

The Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris presents the first retrospective in France devoted to German artist Gabriele Münter (1877-1962). Co-founder of the Munich Blue Rider (Blaue Reiter) circle, Gabriele Münter is one of the most prominent female artists of German Expressionism. In a male-dominated art world, she created an extremely personal and diverse body of work spanning six decades. While her name is often associated with that of Kandinsky, who was her companion during her years in Munich (1903-1914), Gabriele Münter never ceased to reinvent herself, displaying a striking modernity, mastering a wide range of techniques and leaving behind a prolific body of work. Following the highly acclaimed retrospectives devoted to Sonia Delaunay in 2014-2015, Paula Modersohn-Becker in 2016 and Anna-Eva Bergman in 2023, the MAM is continuing its policy of presenting major female figures of modern art whose artistic careers are closely linked to the capital. The museum invites you to discover this pioneer of modern art, who began her career in Paris, where she exhibited for the first time in 1907 at the Salon des Indépendants.

This exhibition deliberately makes such blurriness a key that opens another interpretation of a whole area of modern and contemporary visual creation. Initially defined as “loss of distinctness”, blurriness has shown itself to be the favourite means of expression in a world where instability reigns and visibility is clouded. It was on the ruins left by the Second Word War that this out-of-focus aesthetic took root and began to deploy its inevitably political dimension. The Cartesian principle of discernment, which had prevailed in art for so long, now appeared altogether inoperative. With the erosion of visible certainties and in the face of the range of possibilities available to them as a result, artists came up with new approaches, shaping their works out of the transitory, disorder, movement, incompleteness and doubt… Taking note of a fundamental shift in the world order, they opted for the indeterminate, the indistinct and allusion. This distancing from naturalistic clarity went hand-in-hand with a quest for polysemy, expressed by a permeability of mediums and more importance being assigned to the beholder’s interpretation. Instrument of sublimation as much as manifestation of a latent truth, blurriness became both symptom and remedy of a world in search of meaning.

The Musée national Picasso-Paris collection is the fruit of an extraordinary history, made possible by the dation procedure - today it is the largest public collection of works by Picasso, the "Picassos of Picasso". Coming from the artist's studios, this collection gives us a better grasp of the aesthetic explorations of a Picasso who was by turns disconcerting, plural, contradictory, reflexive, gestural and conceptual, an aesthete and a committed activist, a tinkerer and a poet. Is he symbolist, cubist, classical, surrealist or simply figurative and political?

French post-Impressionist female painter Suzanne Valadon was the first female member of the French Artists Association. She served as a model for Impressionist masters such as Renoir, Degas, and Modigliani of the Paris School. Legend has it that she taught herself to become a professional painter from a painter's model. She walked from behind the drawing board to the drawing board, cleverly and harmoniously, brightly and powerfully, and was not influenced by any school or style. The exhibition will display more than 100 works, covering oil paintings, sketches and prints, plaster and bronze sculptures, etc. The relevant documentary materials play an auxiliary role in our review of the career of a female artist who played an important role in Paris, including her multiple interactions with the avant-garde art circles at the time.

From January 30, 2025,throughJanuary 4, 2026, the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech invites you to experienceYves Saint Laurent: The Hamish Bowles Collection, fifty-three odes to elegance, brought to life through an outstanding loan that will enthral visitors.

The exhibition "Golden Thread. The art of dressing from north Africa to the far east", on show at the Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac until 6 July 2025, focuses on gold in the textile arts from Antiquity to the present day. This plunge into the history of this fascinating and precious metal takes visitors on a journey around the globe, from North Africa to the Middle East, via Japan, China and India. The exhibition also highlights the richness, technicality, inventiveness and expertise of the weavers, embroiderers and craftsmen who have been sublimating fabrics and silks since the dawn of time. This is a unique opportunity to admire a selection of traditional and ceremonial outfits, festive and wedding dresses from North Africa and the Orient, drapes and sparkling costumes from Asia and India, kimonos from the Edo period... and many other textile treasures. Modern creations by Chinese fashion designer Guo Pei are also on show.

When the mirror ball reflects thousands of stars, the Philharmonie de Paris is brewing a cross-century cultural carnival! This art palace famous for classical music is going to put on a gorgeous battle robe for disco music. Starting from Valentine's Day 2025, the six-month-long "Disco, I'm coming out" special exhibition will take you stepping on colorful notes and return to the golden age of freedom and rebellion. Here, every pair of dancing shoes hides a story, and every melody is a declaration of cultural revolution.

Housed in the classic rotunda structure of the Paris Stock Exchange, the Pinault Museum presents Corps et âmes, a selection of about a hundred works from the Pinault Collection, exploring the representation of the body in contemporary art as a response to the huge panorama of paintings that surround the building's glass dome. The exhibition explores the meaning of the body in contemporary thought through works by about forty artists from the Pinault Collection. Freed from all constraints of mimesis, the body - whether photographed, sculpted, painted, photographed or drawn - constantly reinvents itself, thus giving art an essential organic quality that allows it to feel the pulse of the body and the soul, like an umbilical cord.

This monographic exhibition is dedicated to Austrian architect Hans Hollein (1934-2014), most commonly associated with the postmodernist movement following his participation in the inaugural Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980 and his colonnaded façade proposal for the Strada Novissima project. Bringing together the most emblematic pieces from an œuvre spanning over fifty years, the exhibition offers a fresh perspective on the coherence of his artistic and critical approach, viewed through the lens of his engagement with various movements that shaped the post-avant-garde from the 1960s to the 1980s—from informal art to conceptual art, including radical architecture.

Since the 1990s, he has been developing a body of work centred on the passage of time, largely consisting of videos and related drawings, studies, storyboards and dissertations on various projects. Claerbout invites the viewer to explore the plurality of the experience of duration through perception of often miniscule changes. His film Boom (1996), for example, is a slow, attentive observation of a magnificent tree in the countryside. Only the air flowing through its leaves tells us that the image is in motion, prompting us to view it with a demanding yet contemplative eye. The image, simple and beautiful, exerts an unaccustomed fascination by depicting the self-evidence of the tree’s existence in the world.

The Jacquemart-Andre Museum hosts a retrospective of the works of Italian female painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c. 1656), looking back on her fearless life and creative career and exploring her position in the history of 17th century painting.

Before its five-year hiatus, the Centre Pompidou presents Paris Noir, an exhibition focusing on African artists active in Paris between the 1940s and 2000. African artists have received much attention in recent years, and they have practiced and explored various fields from international abstractionism to African and Atlantic abstractionism, from surrealism to free painting, in order to seek identity recognition. However, many of their works have never been exhibited in France before. The exhibition includes works by 150 artists from the United States and Africa. Five contemporary African artists have specially created five art installations for the exhibition, interpreting the memories of African artists in Paris from a contemporary perspective.

A pioneer of Neo-Impressionism and a pillar of anarchist and libertarian circles, Maximilien Luce (1858-1941) marked his era with a profound artistic and political commitment. A painter of urban and rural landscapes and the human condition, he captured the social and industrial transformations of his time with a unique sensitivity. The first Parisian retrospective since 1983 dedicated to this major Neo-Impressionist painter, the exhibition is held just steps from where Luce resided from 1887 to 1900, on Rue Cortot. Rooted in the history of Montmartre and the contradictions of his time, the painter's work is highlighted in this exhibition, which aims to reaffirm his importance and introduce his often overlooked oeuvre to the general public. Besides the humanist character that made the man's heart beat and distinguished his entire oeuvre, landscape was the other dominant theme that animated his painting throughout his life. Luce captures light and color, revealing the beauty of urban and rural landscapes with a persistent social sensitivity. For the exhibition "Maximilien Luce, the Instinct for Landscape," the Musée de Montmartre has chosen to present his work through the prism of landscape, taking visitors on a retrospective journey between the two essential centers of his life: Paris and Rolleboise. Visitors are invited to follow the artist's wanderings from Montmartre, where he lived from 1887 to 1900, through the bustle of the Parisian streets, and through his travels from Saint-Tropez to the Pays-Noir of Charleroi, via the Netherlands, Normandy, and London.

Jean Chatelus, who passed away in 2021 at the age of 82, was a Lyon-born historian and lecturer at the Sorbonne. Throughout his life, he amassed a collection unique, driven more by an impulse to accumulate than by a traditional collector’s approach. Comprising nearly 400 pieces—sculptures, installations, paintings, photographs, drawings, votive and vernacular objects—the collection explores themes of the body, death, and the fleeting nature of life.Presented almost in its entirety, the collection reflects Chatelus’s evolving tastes: from an early fascination with Surrealism and repurposed objects, to a later focus on body art. It also reveals his keen interest in non-Western ethnographic artifacts, folk traditions, and the works of contemporary art’s outsiders and enfant terribles, including Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Christian Boltanski, Yayoi Kusama, Michel Journiac, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, Nam June Paik, Joana Vasconcelos, Andres Serrano, and Wim Delvoye.