Wolfgang Tillmans wins 2026 Roswitha Haftmann Prize. https://ift.tt/Oy2zKDX

German artist Wolfgang Tillmans has won the 2026 Roswitha Haftmann Prize, Europe’s most financially significant arts prize, in recognition of his four-decade photography career and his longstanding social advocacy. The prize, administered by the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation, includes a no-strings-attached monetary award of 150,000 Swiss francs (about $190,000). The prize was established in 2001 and is named after the late Swiss dealer Roswitha Haftmann.

Tillmans, who is best known for his intimate photography of European subcultures, will receive the award in person during a ceremony at the Kunsthaus Zürich on September 17. Past winners of the prize include Cindy Sherman, Cecilia Vicuña, Sigmar Polke, Rosemarie Trockel, and Jeff Wall.

Tillmans was born in Remscheid, Germany and rose to prominence in the 1990s with his candid portraits of LGBTIQ+ youth and rave nightlife culture. Over the years, his practice expanded to include still lifes, astronomical imagery, camera-less photographic experiments, multi-media installations, sound works, and video. In a press statement, the foundation said the prize recognized Tillmans’s role in redefining photography through portraiture, abstraction, installation, publishing, and political engagement. Globally, the artist is co-represented by David Zwirner and London’s Maureen Paley. He is also represented by Regen Projects in Los Angeles, Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris, and Galerie Buchholz in Berlin and Cologne.

“Wolfgang Tillmans is unquestionably one of the trailblazing artists of his generation in the field of photography internationally,” said Bernhart Schwenk, chief curator of contemporary art at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, who will present the award. “His artistic practice goes far beyond the purely aesthetic, harnessing public presence and language to foster a collective democratic consciousness founded on openness and solidarity.”

Tillmans is also a committed social activist. He has organized campaigns opposing Brexit and encouraging voter participation in German and European elections. In 2017, he established the nonprofit foundation, Between Bridges, to support democracy, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and anti-racism initiatives.

The artist’s recent exhibitions include the traveling survey “To Look Without Fear,” which opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2022 before traveling to Toronto and San Francisco, as well as the 2025 exhibitions “Weltraum” at the Albertinum in Dresden and “Nothing could have prepared us–Everything could have prepared us” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

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5 Artists Inspired by Moroccan Rugs and North African Weaving https://ift.tt/dI3xu4h

The loom has always been a form of thinking. For centuries in North Africa, weavers have articulated narratives and philosophies through colorful, patterned rugs. They use a grammar of signs, stitches, rhythm, color, and designs to communicate.

While these tapestries were once diminished by academia and the avant-garde as mere “womanly craft,” contemporary artists from the Maghreb region in Northwest Africa are transforming the medium in ways that both honor and update longstanding traditions. Many grew up around looms and recall their grandmothers’ hands on raw wool, their mothers’ crochet, or the cooperative workshops in their region. They attend to the labor, gestures, and knowledge that lived in the bodies of their women ancestors. Finally, biennales, fairs, and museums around the world are starting to catch on.

Here are five of the most exciting contemporary artists inspired by Moroccan rugs and North African weaving.

Amina Agueznay

B. 1963, Casablanca, Morocco. Lives and works in Marrakech, Morocco.

“Weaving is both sculpture and heritage, tactile and insulating,” Amina Agueznay told me days before the opening of her pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, where she is representing Morocco. “It’s an amazing medium for improvisation.”

The title of Agueznay’s monumental presentation, Asəṭṭa (2026), comes from the Amazigh (a Berber tribe) word for ritual weaving. Asəṭṭa, which was curated by Meriem Berrada and developed through workshops and on-site research with artisan communities across Morocco, centers on the concept of âatba: the threshold.

In the Arsenale, the artist has mounted more than 150 wool panels, woven on vertical looms and stitched with raffia, which cascade from the ceiling. From afar, they resemble Japanese scrolls. Up close, they reveal composite surfaces threaded with Murano glass, metallic filaments, and materials native to the North African craft tradition. Visitors settle into an expansive woven sofa, contemplate the fabric, and become part of the composition.

“Palm husk, wool, natural fibers…these materials have been used by artisans from different regions in their vocabulary, and together they form my lexicon,” Agueznay said.

The artist trained as an architect in Washington, D.C., before returning to Morocco in 1997. She presented her first monumental installation, titled Skin, in 2016 at the Museum Mohamed VI of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat, Morocco. The work emerged from a workshop the artist organized in Bouznika, a fishing town on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, where Agueznay collaborated with a group of craftswomen skilled in crochet, knitting, weaving, macramé, braiding, embroidery, and beading. The resulting sculpture, composed of recycled fishing nets interwoven with twine, wires, sequins, and paper, documented a social process and collective female knowledge.

Agueznay has now worked with artisans for almost two decades. She sees this process as a sacred act, requiring her to leave her ego at the door. “It’s about communicating with gestures, drawings, individual kindnesses, and encouragements, embracing flaws, understanding matter,” she said.

Ghizlane Sahli

B. 1973, Meknes, Morocco. Lives and works in Marrakech.

The Flows that Weave us 04, 2025
Ghizlane Sahli
Galerie le sud

A weaver once told Moroccan artist Ghizlane Sahli: “From the womb, a girl from a weaving tribe feels the rhythm of the loom. As a baby at her mother’s breast, she is surrounded by the scent of raw wool.”

Sahli, who initially trained as an architect in Paris, has similarly connected with textile practices via matriarchal traditions. Femininity and the body became central to her artistic language, which embraces softness, repetition, and time.

“My mother, who used to sew and knit, transmitted this early sensitivity and love for textiles through everyday gestures that were both simple and meaningful,” Sahli said. “These domestic practices formed an intimate environment in which threading became something natural and familiar.”

Et la sève fut... 8, 2023
Ghizlane Sahli
Christophe Person

La Mer, Origine du Monde (MOM 021), 2021
Ghizlane Sahli
Firetti Contemporary

Sahli spent years working alongside local artisans in embroidery ateliers in Morocco. “Our relationship is based on respect, trust, and love,” she said. “It creates a space of exchange where knowledge circulates horizontally rather than hierarchically.” Such collaboration connects and passes knowledge through different generations of women.

The artist is best known for her “Alveoles,” elements in her sculptural compositions made from recycled plastic bottle caps, which the artist wraps and assembles with silk thread. They resemble membranes, tissues, protective skins, sea anemones, or bulging coral as they evoke the fragility of the human body and the vulnerability of the natural world. Sahli first presented her “Alveoles” in Metamorphosis, a 2014 installation at Dar Bellarj in Marrakech.

L'Affranchie, 2023
Ghizlane Sahli
Galerie le sud

Histoires de tripes HT052, 2019
Ghizlane Sahli
Galerie le sud

In recent years, the artist has shifted from a near-monochromatic register to a palette that embraces color, warmth, and celebration. This is evident across her newest work, which she’ll exhibit in "Flowers also grow in Water, where Bodies are born…,” her upcoming December 2026 show at Atelier 21 in Casablanca. “Perhaps this is a response to the chaotic world we are living in today,” she said.

This year, the artist’s monumental piece Fields of Roses (2026) was also installed in the atrium of the new U.S. Consulate in Casablanca.

Mina Abouzahra

B. The Netherlands. Lives and works in Amsterdam and Morocco.

Brick Wall tapestry (One and a half Women), 2026
Mina Abouzahra
Rademakers Gallery

Mina Abouzahra’s motto is: A rug is never just a rug. “In the Amazigh tradition, it represents a document, a record of life, woven with symbols and colors that carry meaning across generations. To reduce it to a commodity is to erase the person who made it,” the Dutch-Moroccan artist said.

Abouzahra’s geometric, minimalist, and playful work unites elements of Dutch contemporary design with Moroccan forms. The artist recently discovered that both her grandmothers had been weavers. “I was stunned my mother had never mentioned it before,” she said. “When she said those words, everything fell into place.”

Roukia no.2, 2024
Mina Abouzahra
Rademakers Gallery

Ghada Samman Chair, 2026
Mina Abouzahra
Rademakers Gallery

In 2023, the artist participated in a year-long residency at a weaving cooperative in Taznakht, Morocco. Her work grew into “The Soul of a Rug,” an immersive exhibition that debuted at the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair Marrakech in 2025. It consisted of a 360-degree virtual reality film that documented the full arc of rug production in Taznakht. The artist also included meaningful objects, including a woven letter, created in the Amazigh bridal tradition, which served as communication between a newly married young woman and her family of origin.

Abouzahra’s approach is political. She feels a deep tension between the intimacy of her handmade work and the brutality of the global market. To counteract those pressures, she collaborates directly with cooperatives and insists on fair compensation and shared authorship.

The artist is currently preparing for a solo exhibition at the Gouda Museum in the Netherlands, opening September 2026. She has started weaving on a Jacquard machine, which allows for both precision and intimacy.

Amira Lamti

B. 1996, Sousse, Tunisia. Lives and works in Sousse.

Amira Lamti’s practice excavates the ritual knowledge of North African women. “Weaving and traditional craft have mostly been transmitted orally; there are no traces to follow,” she said. “It’s a subject that allows you to go toward people and listen to stories, and sometimes it’s really the mystical that takes over.”

The artist trained in photography and video at the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts de Sousse. While she started working primarily with photography, video, installation, and performance, textile has rapidly become one of her media of choice.

Lamti structured her exhibition “Bent el Machta”—or “Daughter of the Machta”—presented at the Yosr Ben Ammar Gallery in Tunis, Tunisia, as part of the 2024 Biennale Jaou, around a figure both intimate and mythic: the machta, or the woman who prepares a bride for the ritual Jelwa ceremony, in which the bride dances in circles while wearing a traditional, heavily embroidered golden garment.

Lamti often prints her own photographs onto traditional Tunisian sefseri, ivory veils woven from silk or fine wool. In her installations, she unites these pieces with archival footage from her family’s VHS cassettes, which documents Outia ceremonies (similar to bridal showers) across generations.

The artist is currently in residence at the Tassarout cultural association in Rabat, making a new body of work that similarly blends textile and photography. At its center are the female Sufi saints of Morocco who, in coastal mythology, protected sailors and fishermen from harm.

Work from “Bent el Machta” will be shown this summer at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the annual summer photography festival in Arles, France.

Amina Saoudi Aït Khay

B. 1955, Casablanca. Lives and works in Akouda, Tunisia.

A former physics and chemistry teacher in Casablanca, Amina Saoudi Aït Khay started making art in 1994. She began painting on silk, then transitioned into weaving: “I felt the need to reclaim the artisanal know-how I had acquired at a very young age behind my mother’s loom,” she said. “She was a great traditional weaver, and she initiated my brother and I to help her out.”

2026 has been a major year for the artist, whose work featured in the Diriyah Contemporary Art Bienniale and is now included in the 61st Venice Biennale.

Saoudi Aït Khay initially followed tradition, then decided to weave without a cartoon, or weaving blueprint. “I adopted an approach based on improvisation, which is quite unconventional,” she said.

The results are tapestries that often look like abstracted landscapes: They’re large, with warm tones, built from irregular forms, which the artist describes as “an organic living body.”

Saoudi Aït Khay was invisible to the larger cultural scene for many years. The Tunisian art world of the 1970s and ’80s viewed her tapestries as neither functional craft nor recognizable art. Over time, her works’ “in-betweenness” became their value, especially as the international art community took an interest in textile art and Tunisian contemporary art rooted in tradition. The artist’s work became part of the collections of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Barjeel Art Foundation, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Tunisia.

Saoudi Aït Khay produces only two or three tapestries a year, and over 20 years, her oeuvre has grown to around 30 works.

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10 Artist-Run Galleries Around the World You Should Know https://ift.tt/12rRvVi

Running a gallery is a tricky enough task. Add to that an active art practice, and you have what might seem like a recipe for creative overload.

Yet around the world, artist-run galleries have been flourishing for years. Their programming and client relationships are often strengthened by the unique experience of having someone at the helm who’s navigated the art world system from an artist’s perspective.

Whether platforming overlooked talent in underserved neighborhoods in Thailand or building a tight-knit community of repeat visitors around an annual summer show on a Greek island—or simply navigating experimental formats in major art cities like Berlin and New York—we’ve selected 10 artist-run galleries with vastly different approaches to operating a space.

Taken together, they’re united in their commitment to providing a level of care and support to artists that they themselves often haven’t experienced in their careers.

Escat Gallery

Based in Barcelona

Founded by: Pau Escat

Before launching his namesake gallery, artist Pau Escat got his start running the pandemic-era creative space Casa Studio Granados alongside his artist wife, Alicia Gimeno. When that project evolved into a more formal operation in 2024, Escat quickly established himself as a solid presence in Barcelona’s gallery scene.

Now spanning three distinct locations, Escat Gallery includes a main space in Trafalgar, southwest Spain, an experimental offshoot in Sarrià (in Barcelona), and Lab Studio, a private research residency in Mahón, Menorca. There, one artist is invited each year for a slower and more concentrated engagement with their practice. Previous residents have included German painter Moritz Berg and, most recently, the Argentine abstract artist Tete Alurralde.

Aurora, 2025
Tete Alurralde
Escat Gallery

This long-term approach to care and development traces back to Escat’s own artistic background, yet the founder and director balances care with the commercial reality of running a gallery.

“There are moments where pragmatic decisions have to be made—often precisely those that my earlier ‘artist self’ would have questioned,” he told Artsy. “I don’t think that tension needs to be resolved. If anything, it’s important that it remains active. Escat exists, in part, within that negotiation.”

The Charoen AArt

Based in Bangkok

Founded by: Bryce Watanasoponwong

Occupying a former home on Charoen Krung Road—the first modern roadway in Thailand— in Bang Kho Laem, The Charoen AArt is embedded in one of Bangkok’s oldest neighborhoods, in a part of the city where access to art remains uneven.

For founder and street photographer Bryce Watanasoponwong, the distance from Bangkok’s thriving gallery circuit is a feature, not a flaw. “Getting here takes time, and the building carries its own history, so the journey and the house become part of how people encounter the work,” he told Artsy.

Lens of Emotion, 2024
Bryce Watanasoponwong
The Charoen AArt

That ethos extends to the programming. Shows like Illya Skubak’s “STRATUM,” which used discarded urban materials and fragments to speak to survival and resilience without relying on familiar images of Thai identity, typifies Watanasoponwong’s approach. “I do it because I care about what it carries, and how it might quietly reach someone standing in front of it,” he said.

Since opening its doors in 2024, the audience that gathers there is small but dedicated—one that “grows gradually, one visit, one conversation, and one moment of recognition at a time.”

Queens Park Railway Club

Based in Glasgow

Founded by: Patrick Jameson and Ellis Luxemburg

Occupying the former ticket office and waiting rooms of the active Queens Park train platform in Glasgow for more than a decade, Queens Park Railway Club (QPRC) is as unorthodox a gallery as they come.

Co-founders Patrick Jameson and Ellis Luxemburg both emerged from the city’s artist-run gallery scene—Jameson through the artist-led exhibition space Glasgow Project Room, Luxemburg through Haunt, an open-air space down an alleyway in Trongate.

Burning palms, 2024
Patrick Jameson
Queens Park Railway Club

City of the future, 2005
Sam Ainsley
Queens Park Railway Club

“That experience and the skills you develop doing that are very much manifested in what we do now,” Jameson told Artsy. The duo has leaned into QPRC’s very public location: a memorable Rob Kennedy exhibition in 2013 that transformed the gallery into a live radio station, with music and spoken word poetry broadcast on the platform during rush hour.

Though once “a wee bit off the beaten track for the Glasgow gallery circuit,” the area has since filled with artists and gallerists, turning the QPRC into one thread in a larger communal tapestry in the city’s art scene.

Rancho Kaya

Based in Mykonos

Founded by: Alexander Mignot and Tzima Dimitra Tsitampani

“At the end of the day, Rancho Kaya is not a gallery; it’s our home,” explained Alexander Mignot, the artist and painter behind the Mykonos-based nonprofit art initiative. His words aren’t hyperbole. Mignot and his wife, Tzima Dimitra Tsitampani—an architect who helped design the space—spent four years constructing Rancho Kaya before opening it as an experimental model in artistic community-building.

Once per summer, Mignot’s studio becomes the site of a sprawling group show drawing an invite-only crowd of repeat visitors and international artists—a deliberate counterpoint to the transient, party-centric atmosphere that overtakes Mykonos, Greece, each summer.

La Soledad del Mar, 2023
Alexander Mignot
Rancho Kaya

Hermanas, 2024
Ivan Daniel Cova
Rancho Kaya

It’s a novel concept that favors something far more domestic. The invited artists become houseguests, having breakfast together, cooking in the kitchen, and spending time with Mignot’s family as they work on the show. Previous exhibitions have included works by Venezuelan street artist Harif Guzman and American painter Magnus Sodamin.

“The relationships we built with the artists become friendships, not business,” Mignot said. “We don’t see [Rancho Kaya] as just a house, but as a sculpture that changes and transforms over time with every artist who comes through it.”

Chilli Gallery

Based in London

Founded by: Aubrey Higgin

In London’s Chalk Farm neighborhood, Chilli Gallery stands out. Occupying a former Japanese restaurant just steps from an underground station, it’s defined by a DIY spirit and a collaborative approach to programming, informed by the active artistic practices of founder Aubrey Higgin and assistant director Max Rumbol.

“Artists are more willing to give us a chance as a gallery, knowing that we have been in their shoes and have a deep interest in their work beyond the business side of things,” Rumbol told Artsy. “It’s more just a bunch of artists working together on a vision for the overall show, putting that front and center.”

Chilli features a tiled kitchen-turned-exhibition space in the basement, plus a ground-floor room with street-facing windows. The gallery draws a genuinely mixed crowd that isn’t afraid to give refreshingly honest feedback.

“Hearing a non-art audience give their ‘unfiltered’ take—good or bad—is one of the best parts,” Rumbol said. “Their perspectives are often way more refreshing than what you hear in the usual art circles.”

Dotted Line LA

Based in Los Angeles

Founded by: Margaux Rocher

Opened this past February in Inglewood’s Beacon Arts Building—a longtime creative hub for local artists—Dotted Line LA is the project of French sculptor and painter Margaux Rocher, whose ties to the neighborhood led her to the gallery’s assistant curator, Jacob Barr. With Dotted Line LA, Rocher aims to create a space that explores the full artistic process, moving beyond showing only the finished work.

In practice, this has meant that artists like Dena Novak—who was in the inaugural exhibition—are free to teach an impasto painting course that deepens participants’ understanding of her technique.

Of Course, Still Here #5, 2026
Zengyi Zhao
Dotted Line LA

“As the space finds its footing, we’ll keep following the artists’ lead,” Rocher told Artsy. “They know what they want to transmit; our role is to create the conditions for that to happen.”

This exploratory approach to running the space has also been a boon for Rocher’s own interdisciplinary practice: “Being a person who brings art and people together has opened my eyes to a 360-degree view of the world of art and exhibitions,” she said. “I experience art from every angle: writing, curating, shaping space, programming, and the dialogue with artists. All of it feeds back to its source: artmaking.”

BBA Gallery

Based in Berlin

Founded by: Renata Kudlacek and Vishal Shah

“Building BBA over the last decade hasn’t been a linear path; it has been a 10-year experiment,” noted Renata Kudlacek, the gallery’s co-founder. Kudlacek launched the gallery with Vishal Shah, a fellow artist and Royal College of Art alumnus, in 2015. The duo describes the gallery’s mission as “art over background,” prioritizing the urgency of a message over market logic.

Central to this mission is the BBA Prizes, open calls for art and photography inspired in part by the duo’s own experience as working artists. “We know how rare it is to be discovered and how even fewer artists can actually sustain a living from their work,” Kudlacek told Artsy. “Our goal is to break the painful barriers of the market and give talented, passionate artists the nurture and visibility they need to reach a turning point in their careers.” Previous recipients of the prize have included photographers Luca Ortis, Pierre-Yves Cruaud, and, in 2025, Taiwanese artist Chung-Kun Wang.

Field -2023, 2023
Chung-Kun Wang
BBA Gallery

Operating amid Berlin’s tumultuous cultural climate has only sharpened their conviction. “It is a constant challenge to find sponsors in this climate,” Kudlacek said. “When the local government stops prioritizing culture, the smaller, independent spaces and emerging artists suffer first.”

Stanek Gallery

Based in Philadelphia and Miami

Founded by: Katherine Stanek

Founded partly in response to the closure of local Philly stronghold Rosenfeld Gallery in 2016, Stanek Gallery was built not on a traditional model, but on a diagnosis of what the city’s art scene was missing.

“Opening a gallery using a traditional structure did not make sense to me,” founder and figurative sculptor Katherine Stanek told Artsy. “There was already plenty of that in the city, and much of it was falling short.”

A decade on, the gallery’s success has exceeded her expectations. “Stanek Gallery is not what I originally imagined,” she said. “It’s stronger, more responsive, and ultimately more impactful.”

Room Full of Mirrors, ca. 2010
James Brantley
Stanek Gallery

Central to its survival during the pandemic, for instance, was the Master Artist Series, launched to provide a platform for underrepresented artists whose community influence had outpaced their market recognition—including printmaker John Dowell and painter James Brantley.

The program was inspired, in part, by Stanek’s own experience: “As an artist who studied with several of the Master Artists in the program, I was directly influenced by their example. The goal was to share those stories so other artists could benefit in the same way I did, while also reminding collectors of the importance, influence, and quality of these artists’ work.”

Uncool Gallery

Based in New York City

Founded by: Carolina Paz

This Was When It Started, 2025
Paige Mostowy
Uncool Gallery

When Uncool Gallery opened in 2024, it began as a genuine experiment in collective ownership: its founding board of over 10 artists shaped the gallery’s vision, positioning, and partnerships. But it has since dissolved as the costs and overhead of maintaining this structure proved too much to bear.

This rocky beginning proved instructive for the gallery’s founder and director, Carolina Paz: “Uncool Gallery is a living thing,” she told Artsy. “The format is adaptable and has changed from its inception, but the level of commitment and collaboration remains the same.”

The philosophy echoes the Brazilian artist’s other venture, Uncool Artist, a grassroots network of resources and opportunities for artists worldwide. As part of its quarterly Solo Show Open Call program, Uncool Gallery has provided a $1,000 stipend and given a two-week solo show to young talent, including a recent show of works by architect and artist Campbell Brod for spring 2026.

Directing both ventures has strengthened Paz’s own practice. “Helping artists bring projects into form and supporting that process seriously feeds my own work. The two things strengthen each other,” she said.

ILY2

Based in Portland, Oregon

Founded by: Allie Furlotti

Portland’s ILY2 began as a direct response to local artists’ needs. When the gallery opened in 2020, its founder, Allie Furlotti, handed the keys to whoever needed space, paid the rent, and let them run it however they wanted.

“As a young artist, she experienced the barriers to grants and funding, and she wanted to break down that bureaucracy in her own way,” senior director Jeanine Jablonski told Artsy.

Now with spaces in Portland and New York, ILY2 is built on a philosophy of long-term care that meets each artist where their specific needs are, which, as Jablonski noted, “sometimes isn’t relevant to the work they are making, but is always relevant to how they thrive.”

Untitled, 1978
Bonnie Lucas
ILY2

Some Favorite Things, 2018
Bonnie Lucas
ILY2

In practice, this has meant going to the fourth-floor walk-up studio of Bonnie Lucas, a 75-year-old New York artist, to help clear out old works she couldn’t move herself, so she could make large-scale pieces again for the first time in years.

“We go above and beyond because we genuinely want the people we work with to have a better experience than we’ve had,” Furlotti told Artsy. With Lucas set for her first institutional show at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2027, the ILY2 approach has paid off.

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10 Must-See Shows During Paris Gallery Weekend 2026 https://ift.tt/VPTuabE

Hyphae 3, 2026
Ines Katamso
Galerie Droste

There’s no best time of year to be in Paris, but late spring is especially magical. The flowers are in full bloom, the museums present their biggest shows, and terraces teem with activity and pichets of rosé thanks to extended hours of sunlight. Paris Gallery Weekend arrives before summer heat hits the city, with three days of programming from May 29th to 31st.

The weekend celebration, organized by the Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art, marks its 14th year as 73 galleries across the Marais, Matignon, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, as well as nearby Belleville, Pantin, and Romainville, organize artist talks, performances, vernissages, and exhibition walkthroughs. A selection of galleries have given carte blanche to writers, museum leaders, critics, professors, artists, and curators to organize special shows.

Among the highlights are Waddington Custot’s inaugural exhibition at their new Paris outpost featuring work by Les Nabis artists, and American-born, Australia-based painter Amber Boardman’s stirring show at Brigitte Mulholland.

Below, Artsy selects the 10 can’t-miss shows of Paris Gallery Weekend.

“All That She Holds Inside”

Galerie Droste

Through June 13

Alabaster Dreamin, 2024
Anna Virnich
Galerie Droste

This group exhibition features work by five women artists—Anna Virnich, Nada Elkalaawy, Ines Katamso, Julie Legouez, and Karla Leyva—who explore matrilineal inheritance. Women are invariably marked by the memories, strengths, and deferred dreams of prior generations, and these artists untangle such complex legacies.

In particular, the show explores how grandmothers act as stabilizing, central, and sometimes overlooked forces in a family. Berlin-based artist Anna Virnich presents Alabaster Dreamin (2024), a textile composition layered with silk, velvet, cotton, and satin on screen nettle. It both reveals and conceals a delicate, lace-like figure that peeks from behind transparent swathes of fabric. The piece suggests how materials absorb and transmit charged emotions like anger, fragility, or sadness. Franco Indonesian artist Ines Katamso also uses fabric as a means of storing memory. Hyphae 4 (2026), her work on cotton, features smeared soil the artist collected from Java, Indonesia, Bali, and France to explore the relationship between humans and ecology.

Kishio Suga

Mendes Wood DM

Mar. 26–June 4

Japanese sculptor and installation artist Kishio Suga is known for his site-specific installations and assemblages made from natural, everyday materials such as stones, wood, metal, wire, and concrete. As a member of the Mono-ha movement, a group of Japanese artists who rose to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s for prioritizing such humble objects’ natural properties, Suga calls his works “situations” rather than “compositions.”

Now in his eighties, the artist, whose work is seldom shown in France, is the subject of a monumental, career-spanning exhibition at Mendes Wood DM that takes place across both their locations in Paris and New York. In their space on the Place des Vosges, a selection of Suga’s two-dimensional works and three-dimensional situations from the 1970s through the 2010s are on view: The artist arranged a small wall of stones across and beside the limestone steps of the Haussmannian staircase, while a constellation of wooden boards at 90-degree angles extend across the tile floor above. Upstairs, Boundary of Marginal Scenery (1994–2026) features a floor-to-ceiling grid of wooden planks that restrain a spread of painted beams projecting from the gallery’s corner.

Michel Jocaille

“Lily of the Valley”

Galerie Les filles du calvaire

Through June 20

Lily of the Valley, 2026
Michel Jocaille
Galerie Les filles du calvaire

“Lily of the Valley” marks Michel Jocaille’s first solo exhibition in Paris. Jocaille hails from a region in northern France rich with textile tradition, which informs the theatrical sculptures and installations he creates with wax, glass, and printed velvet panne. He employs techniques that he learned growing up, like crochet, weaving, and knitting. They’re also common to the region’s mills, and Jocaille creates a dialogue between industrial and cultural heritage.

The show reframes these traditions, which are too often seen as decorative or too feminine. Jocaille has titled his show after a flower praised for its tender beauty, which also symbolizes the fight for workers’ rights. In France, the lily of the valley, with its delicate cascade of white bells and green fronds, is also handed out on Labor Day as a symbol of good luck, good fortune, and the good of the collective. In Muguet crochet (2026), an assemblage of these crochet lilies of the valley is mounted atop metal stems, which poignantly rise from a tangle of black crochet atop a wooden podium. Jocaille’s work also features in the gallery’s concurrent group show, which marks its 30th anniversary.

Aude Herlédan and Eleanor Lakelin

“In Light and in Shadow”

1831 Art Gallery

May 29–June 30

Sous le Soleil Exactement II, 2024
Aude Herledan
1831 Art Gallery

Lidded Vessel #3, 2024
Eleanor Lakelin
1831 Art Gallery

A chance encounter brought artists Aude Herlédan and Eleanor Lakelin together a decade ago. Now, the friends are presenting a two-person show at 1831 Art Gallery’s space in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Herlédan is a French multidisciplinary artist whose gestural, lyrical paintings feature decisive brushstrokes and take inspiration from poetry. British sculptor Lakelin carves sculptures from sequoia and burr, accentuating the wood’s scars and its natural “memory.”

“In Light and in Shadow” is the result of ongoing collaboration. This past fall, the artists immersed themselves in each other’s studios. They each produced new work that directly responded to the other’s practice. These pieces will appear in the show alongside the works that inspired them. The exhibition continues a dialogue between the artists, first explored in a similar show at New York’s Rosenberg & Co. earlier this year.

Richard Nonas

Galerie Christophe Gaillard

Through June 20

Untitled, 2003
Richard Nonas
Galerie Christophe Gaillard

Untitled, n.d
Richard Nonas
Galerie Christophe Gaillard

American Postminimalist artist Richard Nonas made modular sculptures from raw wood, stone, and steel, which he believed to carry deep philosophical meaning. The artist initially trained as an anthropologist and carried out field research on American Indian tribes across Canada and the American Southwest. He turned to sculpture in his mid-thirties and became a part of the early 1970s downtown New York art scene alongside Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt, Keith Sonnier, and other artists. His anthropological background informed his sculptures, which used negative space as a material and highlighted how objects and sculpture itself can activate an environment. In the Marais, Galerie Christophe Gaillard presents a selection of Nonas’s small-scale sculptures and works on paper, all made between 1983 and 2016 (the artist passed away in 2021). An untitled, floor-based sculpture anchors the show.

Paula Rego

“Drawing from Life”

Galerie Lelong

Through July 11

Life Room III, 2005
Paula Rego
Galerie Lelong

Scarecrow III, 2006
Paula Rego
Galerie Lelong

Galerie Lelong presents drawings and lithographs by Portuguese visual artist Paula Rego, which the artist made in her London studio during an intense period between 2005 and 2007. Shortly after her 70th birthday, Rego turned to prints, which she could execute faster than her layered paintings. The dark, complex works on view draw on fairytales and folk legends to explore hierarchies, oppression, and interpersonal dynamics. Some take inspiration from The King of Pigs, a 16th-century Italian fairytale by Giovanni Francesco Straparola about an anthropomorphic pig, while others use the work of playwright and director Martin McDonagh as a catalyst. Upon seeing McDonagh’s 2003 play The Pillowman. Rego asked him for more dark, twisted stories, and he shared a series of unpublished manuscripts. Rego united his narratives with memories of her childhood in Portugal under fascist rule. The resulting works are extraordinarily imaginative attempts to grapple with the complexities of human nature.

Arcangelo Sassolino

“Aux abord du séisme”

GALLERIA CONTINUA

Through May 30

La consistance du vide, 2026
Arcangelo Sassolino
GALLERIA CONTINUA

The title of Italian artist Arcangelo Sassolino’s latest solo show at GALLERIA CONTINUA translates to “on the verge of the earthquake.” It’s an apt title for a presentation that investigates the physical limitations of matter and its precarity when subject to significant force. New and existing works are on view, and many will transform over the course of the show. In Damnatio memoriae (2016), for instance, a marble bust of a Roman torso sits on a metal plinth while an industrial apparatus with a spinning round saw slowly shaves down the sculpture. A new work, La consistance du vide (2026), features a large slab of black marble placed atop a floating sheet of glass. Its gargantuan weight bends the pane, which threatens to shatter.

Lee Mingwei

“Lorsque la beauté paraît”

Perrotin

Through May 30

In his first exhibition with Perrotin in Paris, Taiwanese-born American artist Lee Mingwei presents seven works, created between 1995 and 2005, which question our relationship to beauty. Curator Thierry Raspail has organized the show, which includes the participatory work The Mending Project (2009–2026): The artist sits at the end of a long table and invites visitors to bring him their damaged garments, which he patches and repairs with colorful threads. Throughout the exhibition, the mended items remain laid out with fragments of threads still attached. Mingwei demonstrates that damage should not be hidden, but celebrated for its capacity to transform. Also on view is a selection of the artist’s “breath drawings,” for which he places droplets of sumi calligraphy ink on thin alabaster tablets. He meditates, then breathes on the droplets, invoking the internal and external to make the compositions.

Khalif Tahir Thompson

“Beautiful Land”

Zidoun-Bossuyt

May 29–July 18

Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Khalif Tahir Thompson is on the rise. For his second solo show with Zidoun-Bossuyt, he presents “Beautiful Land,” a suite of new compositions made with oil and acrylic paints, handmade paper, papyrus, and oil pastels. The artist’s layered portraits of Black figures (family, friends, and imagined characters) give art historical styles a contemporary update. His layered canvases take inspiration from Fauvist masters Henri Matisse and André Derain, German Expressionists Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and the luminous canvases of Harlem Renaissance painter Beauford Delaney. In addition to his representation with Zidoun-Bossuyt, Thompson joined Victoria Miro’s roster last month. He’ll present his first solo show in London with the gallery this fall. Thompson was recently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture in North Carolina, and his work belongs to collections including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.

Szabolcs Bozó

“Antidote”

Semiose

May 23–June 20

Jupiter, 2026
Szabolcs Bozó
Semiose

A Dog's Dream, 2026
Szabolcs Bozó
Semiose

Hungarian-born, London-based painter Szabolcs Bozó returns to Semiose for his second solo show with the gallery. He presents new works that feature his technicolor cartoon characters in states of motion. While past works have depicted an ensemble of these googly-eyed creatures against punchy, static backgrounds, the new paintings appear more frenetic, relying on Bozó’s spontaneous, brazen brushstrokes. A year after the artist began making art between shifts at a London restaurant, a Spanish gallery discovered the artist on Instagram in 2018 and offered him a residency in Mallorca, Spain. He presented his first show with Semiose in the summer of 2020, featuring raw, playful paintings that perhaps call to mind Hungarian folklore; now, thanks to the recent onset of war and unrest, the work has become more sinister. In Cold Landing (2026), an acrylic and sand depiction of a dancing elephant, the subject remains largely in focus while its chaotic environment betrays its hopeful gaze. And in Jupiter (2026), a grinning mouse takes a fighter’s stance.

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