hube guide: Paris beyond the runway

Calder. Rêver en équilibre

Fondation Louis Vuitton

April 15th–August 16th, 2026

Calder. Rêver en Équilibre, marks the centenary of Alexander Calder’s arrival in France and fifty years since his death. Bringing together nearly 300 works spanning five decades, the retrospective reveals how Calder reshaped sculpture through movement, balance, gravity, light, and time. 

Highlights include the return of the legendary Cirque Calder, the miniature circus that enchanted Paris’s avant-garde, alongside his celebrated mobiles, stabiles, wire portraits, paintings, drawings, and sculptural jewellery. Works by Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso place his practice within the broader narrative of modernism, while photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Irving Penn, and Agnès Varda offer rare glimpses into his life and creative circle. Suspended within Frank Gehry’s architecture, Calder’s kinetic works animate the galleries in a constantly shifting play of form, balance, and space. Presented at Fondation Louis Vuitton, the exhibition ranks among the most comprehensive surveys ever devoted to one of the twentieth century’s most influential artists.

Michelangelo and Rodin. Living bodies

Musée du Louvre

April 15th–July 20th, 2026

Two sculptural giants, Michelangelo and Rodin, stand in quiet tension—each pushing the human body toward its own vision of intensity and truth. 

Michelangelo and Rodin. Living bodies stages a rare encounter between these masters, where the figure becomes a carrier of emotion, energy, and interior force. Spanning marble, bronze, plaster, terracotta, and drawings, more than 200 works chart both shared fascinations and radical divergences, as each artist reworks antiquity into increasingly charged formal language. 

Key works include Michelangelo’s Non Finito fragments, Rodin’s studies of motion and fragmentation, and a compelling exchange between their canonical anatomical studies and monumental bodies. Organised into five thematic chapters, the exhibition moves from nature and classical references through gesture and material experimentation to the body as a living force. 

Co-organised with the Musée Rodin, it offers a renewed reading of sculpture as a field of perpetual motion, suspended between endurance and change.

Exposition générale

The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain

October 25th, 2025–August 23rd, 2026

What happens when a museum collection refuses to follow the rules? Exposition Générale offers one answer, drawing on four decades of exhibitions to chart an alternative history of contemporary art across disciplines, generations, and ways of seeing. Organised around four themes—architecture, nature, making, and the dialogue between art, science, and technology—the exhibition dismantles familiar hierarchies, presenting culture as a site of inquiry, exchange, and discovery. 

Highlights range from architectural models and large-scale installations to works addressing endangered ecosystems, projects that blur the lines between art, craft, and design, and visionary pieces shaped by scientific research and speculative fiction. A new scenography by Formafantasma responds to Jean Nouvel’s architecture with modular textile structures that continually reshape visitors’ experience of the space. Looking forward rather than dwelling on the past, Exposition Générale reveals a collection in perpetual motion, reflecting the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain’s enduring commitment to experimentation and artistic dialogue.

Fujiko Nakaya: Cloud #07156

Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection 

June 4th–September 14th, 2026

In Cloud #07156, Fujiko Nakaya envelops the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce in drifting mist, letting architecture slip into a shifting atmosphere of vapour and air. Presented within Clair-obscur, the work saturates the space with dense fog that alternately reveals and erases the building’s monumental curves.

Drawing on high-pressure systems refined over decades, Nakaya sculpts fog as a fleeting material, shaped by wind, temperature, and the movement of visitors. The result is a mutable landscape where visibility wavers and bodies move through constantly shifting conditions of presence and disappearance.

Les Esquisses De La Caverne

Perrotin

June 5th–July 25th, 2026

JR’s latest exhibition brings together collages, photographs, drawings, and sculptural assemblages that chart the genesis of La Caverne du Pont Neuf. Functioning simultaneously as artworks and preparatory studies, these pieces reveal the artist’s path from initial concept to the large-scale public installation that temporarily turned Paris’s oldest bridge into a cavernous passageway.

Photography, hand-drawn interventions, collage, and reclaimed zinc surfaces converge in richly layered compositions, dissolving the line between record and invention. Driven by questions of perception, illusion, and spatial experience, the works reflect JR’s enduring fascination with altering how familiar places are seen and understood.

The exhibition also highlights the artist’s distinctive approach to image-making: assembling fragments into cohesive visual narratives, where disparate elements coalesce into poetic reflections on memory, connection, and possibility.

Leandro Erlich

Grand Palais 

June 2nd–September 6th, 2026

Spanning more than three decades of artistic inquiry, Leandro Erlich’s retrospective features landmark installations, new works, and rarely exhibited studies, drawing visitors into a universe where architecture, perception, and illusion are in constant flux.

Using mirrors, altered viewpoints and skilful trompe l’œil techniques, Erlich transforms everyday settings into extraordinary experiences that challenge the notion of reality. Highlights include floating boats, suspended indoor clouds, seemingly endless architectural mazes, and his celebrated façade installation, in which visitors appear to walk vertically across a building’s surface.

The exhibition also provides an insight into the artist’s creative process, showcasing models, sketches, and prototypes that reveal the ideas and experiments behind his large-scale creations. Witty, disorienting and deeply perceptive, the exhibition examines the fragile threshold between reality and illusion, and the stories we construct around them.

Fashion in Majesty, Haute Couture and Tradition at the Court of Thailand

The Museum of Decorative Arts

May 13th–November  1st, 2026

Where craftsmanship, diplomacy, and haute couture converge, fashion becomes a cultural language. Fashion in Majesty: Haute Couture and Tradition at the Court of Thailand traces this remarkable exchange through the vision of Queen Sirikit, whose patronage united Thai textile traditions with the artistry of Parisian couture. 

Featuring more than 100 garments, accessories, jewels, and exquisite silk textiles from the Thai royal collections, the exhibition follows the evolution of court dress—from the eight traditional costume styles to the enduring creative partnership with Pierre Balmain and Maison Lesage. 

Highlights include rare royal wardrobes alongside demonstrations of embroidery, weaving, basketry, and other masterful techniques that continue to sustain Thailand’s textile heritage. Presented in collaboration with the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles and the Sustainable Arts and Crafts Institute of Thailand, the exhibition honours decades of artistic exchange between Thailand and France, revealing how design can carry history, identity, and cultural memory across generations.

Le Joaillier Révolutionnaire

Palais de Tokyo

June 24th–July 20th, 2026

At the Palais de Tokyo, Pomellato unveils its first Paris exhibition, Le Joaillier Révolutionnaire, tracing the Maison’s bold evolution since 1967. The project stages a dynamic exchange between jewellery, design, and photography, revealing how Pomellato reshaped ideas of style, craftsmanship, and femininity. Alongside these archival works, sculptural chains, vivid gemstones, and signature collections such as Nudo map Pomellato’s ongoing pursuit of jewellery as expressive, wearable form. 

Photography plays a defining role, with striking images by Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, Gian Paolo Barbieri, and Michel Comte helping forge the Maison’s distinctive visual identity. Across the exhibition, photography operates as an active creative language rather than documentation, amplifying the Maison’s radical voice and its commitment to women’s independence and self-expression.

Sterling Ruby: Till Death Do Us Part

Gagosian

June 12th–October 3rd, 2026

Sterling Ruby’s current exhibition Till Death Do Us Part, presented with Gagosian, reads as a poignant tribute to the floral—where flowers emerge as both material and symbol, fragile yet enduring. 

The project expands Ruby’s longstanding interest in nature, devotion, and mortality, viewing the botanical world through themes of attachment, memory, and disappearance. The monumental GHOSTS collages sweep across the walls in saturated tones of Prussian blue, ultramarine, and violet. Cyanotype impressions mingle with drawn interventions, creating rich, atmospheric surfaces charged with movement and depth.

In conversation with these works, the cast-bronze Bound Flowers. Couple. sculptures present paired blossoms caught in an intimate embrace, recalling the formal poses and restrained tenderness of wedding portraits. Drawing on Flemish and Dutch still-life painting, the exhibition quietly links beauty to transience. Wilted petals and darkened bronze become reminders of life’s cycles, where flourishing and fading remain inseparable.

Annette Messager: Histoires des oreillers

Marian Goodman Gallery

July 3rd—September 26th, 2026

The Marian Goodman Gallery is presenting an exhibition by Annette Messager that explores memory, storytelling and shifting identities, where private fragments slip into the shared imagination. Using everyday materials and theatrical composition, she builds a tactile visual language across assemblages, textiles, photographs, drawings and sculptural works. Fairy tales, myths and doubles recur as figures that are unstable and hover between reality and fiction.

Highlights include hybrid installations that combine taxidermy, embroidery and found objects to create intimate yet unsettling narratives. Resisting fixed readings, the exhibition opens a space where recollection, fantasy and emotion continually overlap and shift.

Africa Fashion

Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chira

March 31st–July 12th, 2026

Africa Fashion charts the rise of contemporary African design, tracing its trajectory from the post-independence era to today’s global stage. The exhibition spotlights visionary designers who have reshaped fashion by fusing ancestral craftsmanship with daring innovation and contemporary sensibilities. Through garments, textiles, jewellery, photography, and archival material, it shows how dress becomes a language of identity, cultural memory, and self-definition across the continent.

Pioneers such as Shade Thomas-Fahm and Alphadi appear alongside a new generation of influential voices reshaping fashion’s global outlook. Rarely seen African textiles and adornments sit in dialogue with contemporary pieces, linking long-standing traditions with forward-looking design. Across these works emerges a vivid portrait of an Africa that is diverse, inventive, and increasingly central to the international fashion conversation.

It’s Chic! Sheila Metzner & Lillian Bassman

La Galerie Rouge

May 29th–September 19th, 2026

The photographic worlds of Lillian Bassman and Sheila Metzner are brought together under the title C’est Chic! These two visionaries reshaped fashion imagery through experimentation and painterly precision. 

The exhibition treats photography as a process of change, in which the printed image is given as much importance as the captured moment itself. Bassman’s hazy, softly dissolved compositions and daring darkroom work suspend silhouettes between presence and disappearance. By contrast, Metzner’s richly layered, atmospheric photographs, often created using the Fresson printing technique, evoke a cinematic, almost painted aura of glamour and myth.

Their works push against the boundaries between photography and fine art, elevating fashion imagery to an emotionally charged visual language.

Yasushi Amano: What rises

Crèvecoeur

June 5th–July 25th, 2026

For his first solo exhibition, Yasushi Amano presents a compelling group of sculptures that examine presence, change, and the nature of being. Working with hand-built clay, he shapes forms around absence itself, treating emptiness as a vital sculptural element rather than a void to be filled.

Influenced by Japan’s experimental ceramic tradition, Amano moves beyond utility, using sculpture to probe questions of existence and perception. Highlights include striking blackened and pale-toned works produced through carbonization firing, where fire, chance, and material interact in unpredictable ways.

Suspended between abstraction and figuration, the sculptures possess a quiet yet powerful physicality—appearing as remnants, witnesses, or echoes shaped by time, memory, and elemental forces.