Reviews (french only) — Slash Paris

Blending history, imagined projections, oral traditions, and visual invention, the exhibition O des origines explores the founding narratives that shape our understanding of the world and its possible futures.

There are places where art history is not only displayed but lived, written, debated and continually reinvented. To mark its fortieth anniversary, Galerie Berthet Aittouarès entrusted art historian Pierre Wat with the inaugural curatorship of a series of exhibitions drawing on a collection of remarkable richness.

At Galerie Loevenbruck, forms and intentions intertwine in a captivating dance. Bodies appear frozen in matter, yet they continue to pulse with a quiet, underlying energy. Spread across two chapters, this monographic exhibition reveals the work of Alina Szapocznikow in all its complexity.

In Héloïse Farago’s exhibition at Florence Loewy Gallery, playfulness, decoration and imagination come together to transform the space in unexpected ways. The visual language feels familiar, drawing on the worlds of celebration and domestic life, yet the scale of the works unsettles our usual points of reference. Objects appear larger or smaller than expected, disrupting the proportions through which we make sense of reality.

At Emba Gennevilliers, L. Camus-Govoroff presents a remarkably coherent and assured exhibition that plays with thresholds and transitions, solids and voids, to build a nuanced exploration of perception and sensitivity.

Présentée au sein d’une exposition chez Xippas dont la douceur n’enlève rien à la force, Chechu Alava confectionne à travers ses toiles une savante alchimie du rayonnement et de l’intériorité, de la lenteur et de l’immédiate évidence. Portant à la lumière autant que soulignant le retrait, sa peinture explore depuis une vingtaine d’années le spectre de la représentation féminine en entretenant l’ambiguïté poétique de ses lectures, l’évidence politique de sa réappropriation. En tous sens.

At Galerie Womanray, Damien Moulierac presents a haunting and deeply inhabited meditation on a fractured world, where shifting temporalities, unstable memories and raw emotional violence take shape through paintings, sculptures and drawings layered with multiple readings.

Presented at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Pantin, Nymphäum by Anselm Kiefer feels like a turning point, even within a body of work that has always thrived on scale, density and ambition.

At lilia ben salah’s gallery, in what reads like a retrospective under the eye of Éric Mangion, Mohamed Lekleti’s kaleidoscopic vision binds our shared humanity to the fragile moorings of his own imagination, in all its ambiguity.

The Traits Libres gallery presents, with It Was Never Meant to Last Forever, a radical installation that reflects the depth of Margarita Wenzel’s research.

Miriam Cahn presents Still Leben at Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, an exhibition of striking beauty. Its emotional impact is all the more intense as it relies on a frontal and pared-down approach, capable of stunning the viewer and lingering in the memory of anyone who encounters it.

The monumental self-portrait that opens Aysha E Arar’s exhibition at the Ferme du Buisson echoes with screams of terror and rumblings of resistance. A figure caught in a struggle that, from within intimacy, embraces history.

Through an imaginary world and an aesthetic of rare singularity, drawing on mythology, organic science fiction, heroic fantasy and the fantastic, and unfolding within a chromatic palette that is at once soft and marked by sharp contrasts, Virginie Ittah presents in her first monographic exhibition at Galerie Poggi a trajectory conceived as a total proposition whose ambition and success match the emotion it evokes.

While the Bourse de Commerce, with Clair-obscur, offers a journey of deliciously philosophical, profound, and deeply engaged ambitions centered on the question of the gaze, it stumbles upon a haphazard construction, multiplying the spotlight on artists without fully committing to a monographic approach, nor truly living up to its promise.

The Salon de Montrouge offers this year an edition commensurate with its ambitions, unfolding without upheaval a selection of artists of very high quality.

A major figure of abstract painting who passed away in 2007, whose intense and subtle works inhabit the great collections of modern art, Sarah Grilo continues to weigh upon contemporary history alongside the greatest artists.

Presented at the Mac Val, Voyez-vous ça! offers a sensual and disorienting journey through the work of Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, a singular artist, writer, teacher and performer whose practice has been woven since the 1980s from humor, popular cultural legacies and art history.

At Galleria Continua, artist Susana Pilar gives form, in a striking silence, to the accumulated pain of peoples marked by oppression, domination, and erasure. Her work moves across eras and territories to question the systemic violence these populations have endured and whose traces persist to this day.

Disturbing and profoundly shaped by unease, the work of the young american artist Kathia St. Hilaire, whose first exhibition in France is presented by Galerie Perrotin, unfolds her re-reading of a biased history by reinterpreting images and life stories disrupted by forms of political oppression.

The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature is hosting the exhibition La licorne, l’étoile et la lune (The Unicorn the Star and the Moon) by the duo Florentine and Alexandre Lamarche Ovize who make enchantment the driving force of an inventive and spellbinding aesthetic within a space the duo inhabits in its entirety.

As a formidable experimenter of forms and images, of visual daring and techniques, Boris Mikhailov presents at the Suzanne Tarasieve Gallery a remarkable exhibition that bears witness to his determination to outwit symbols and keep his focus at the level of women and men in the process of becoming.

Presented at the Nathalie Obadia gallery, the first emblematic works of Andres Serrano allow us to return to the source of an œuvre that, from its emergence in the 1980s, was shaped through a play of reversals and frictions.

At Galerie Allen, the exhibition The Nerve, conceived by the artist Tarek Lakhrissi, plays with fullness and emptiness with a gratifying depth. Behind the striking accumulation of signs and images, his own work remains in the background, choosing instead to construct a framework of thought in negative form, stripped of his personal works yet filled with his life.

lilia ben salah gallery presents an exhibition of great subtlety by the artist Camille Pradon (born in 1993), who continues here her in depth research into the materiality of the image by orchestrating a sensitive and silent dialogue between materials.

At Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery, Franck Chalendard deploys a fantastic energy which, while initially striking for its dynamism, convinces through the multitude of side paths it leads painting down; paths whose radical nature pushes the practice beyond its own frame.

The Palais de Tokyo opts for sobriety and an intelligence of forms with an exceptional and perfectly mastered exhibition of the sculptural work of Melvin Edwards, restoring for the French public his full place in the history of sculpture and situating him within a rich and inspiring spiritual continuity oscillating between universality and particularism of expression.

In Agathe May’s universe, presented at the Catherine Putman Gallery, images are grasped in flashes, frontally, almost familiarly, somewhere between the memory of illustrations and the realism of a testimony anchored — and inked — in collective memory

Polka Gallery presents Immersion, a retrospective exhibition of Joel Meyerowitz, a pioneer of color photography, which sets some of his iconic works alongside the continuous projection of an interview with the artist.

Christopher Le Brun approaches painting as a field of intensity where the impulse of gesture, the density of material, and the resonance of images converge. His work, nourished as much by art history as by sensory experience, progresses through patient layers, allowing an inner light to surface in each painting.

June Crespo, a Spanish artist born in 1982, whose intriguing sculptures merging the organic with the mechanical we were able to discover at the 2022 Venice Biennale, presents her first exhibition in France at the Crédac, Rose Trraction.

The Picasso Museum is hosting a stark exhibition of Philip Guston, The Irony of History, which, behind the appealing idea of a meaningful encounter, is unfortunately spoiled by a display whose pacing is rather weak and largely awkward.

Through materiality and the reinvention of ritual practices, the Self-Comb Sisters—at the origin of the exhibition presented at Kadist—formed a community of Chinese women who chose to remain single in the early 20th century and devoted themselves to silk work.

In this variation on self-portraiture, the artist stares at the lens or turns away from it, exposes herself and withdraws, letting her features stretch and ripple across the solidified drips of the canvases that receive her impressions.

Ruoxi Jin’s exhibition Microclimats, presented at Mennour Gallery in Paris from October 16 to November 22, 2025, invites a journey in which found objects, bodily metaphors, and suspended temporalities become autonomous zones of interest that the artist connects to one another.

As part of the exhibition Frammenti, presented at Bernard Jordan Gallerie in Paris from October 18 to November 22, 2025, the artist duo Hippolyte Hentgen, composed of Gaëlle Hippolyte and Lina Hentgen, invites the visitor on a visual journey where imagination takes hold of space, volume, and color.

Dans les méandres d’une pensée plastique en expansion, au cœur même de la réflexion intime que l’artiste entretient avec son propre geste, Pauline-Rose Dumas propose, pour sa première exposition personnelle à la galerie Anne-Laure Buffard, une partition réjouissante et sensible.

Drifts of cosmic dreams and the depths of pain intersect in the new thematic exhibition at the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Door to the Cosmos, with Nick Cave, George Clinton, Michi Meko and Zohra Opoku.

Dernier volet du triptyque d’expositions Breaking Kayfabe entamé il y a quelques mois à la Maison Populaire de Montreuil qui emprunte au monde du catch son lexique afin de réfléchir, à ses côtés, à la dimension représentative et interactive de l’exposition, Heel Turn, sous l’impulsion de sa commissaire Camille Martin, poursuit cette exploration du monde de l’art en acte.

Plays on scale and breaths of transparency, Jaume Plensa’s sculptures redefine the space of Galerie Lelong, which is dedicating to him an exhibition at his own measure: monumental.

Avec Trouver son monde, le 19M propose une très belle exposition qui, à travers une thématique propice à l’imaginaire, parvient à articuler des visées poétiques, des rêves de matière et de véritables enjeux politiques.