Saturday night, the streets of the Marais pulsed with the Paris it crowd flowing between vernissages. Over 30 galleries held openings to kick off the rentrée and wake up our senses after long summers outside the city. Here are our top 5 must-see gallery exhibitions.

  1. Anna Gaskell – Douglas Gordon / Vampyr

Never before has a classic story come so shockingly to life within the white walls of an art gallery. Dark photographs, smashed stage lights, limbs of dead swans emerging from the walls, taxidermy wolves gnarling in the gallery corners. A fantastic Black Swan nightmare. The enveloping sense of darkness captivates the mind. Not only is the show brilliantly executed from an aesthetic viewpoint, the sense of motion within the space is remarkable. Even the still images lend to what becomes a mad trip through an obsessive nightmare.

Yvon Lambert
108, rue Vieille du Temple
75003 Paris
Open: Sept. 6- Oct. 25 // Tuesday-Saturday 10am-7pm
Métro: Filles du Calvaire

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  1. Jules de Balincourt / Blue Hours

Each of de Balincourt’s paintings whisper their stories in the language of color, and subtly they move to life. The bold blocks of paint come together to create silent scenes of human interaction. The images immediately feel comfortable and softly realistic despite the clear lack of ambition towards photo-like reality.

A particular stand-out piece offers an enormous portrait with tiny boats sailing through the blue background and visage alike. The eyes speak of distrust, an air of having to watch his own back, and softly scribbled in red reads “misfit island”. The piece evokes a subtle prose of vulnerability and timeless human emotion.

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
7, rue Debelleyme
75003 Paris
Open: Sept. 6- Oct. 18 // Tuesday-Saturday 10am-7pm
Métro: St. Sébastien Froissard

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  1. Laurent Grasso / Soleil Double

With the waning summer sun pouring through the front doors, two natural, pure bronze circles hang side by side on the gallery wall. Next to them, written in an impossible blue neon within a deep black box, stand the words soleil double, double sun. To see the natural perfection of the two “suns” rest dictated by an unnatural human invention, neon, creates an immediately captivating contradiction.

Throughout the other gallery halls are pinned small depictions of medieval scenes of catastrophe, often with sudden surreal interjections. Other more nouveau-style pieces dot the exhibition, juggling the viewer between “then” and “now”.

Ultimately, the exhibition plays on a concept created by Grasso of a hidden second sun that wreaks havoc and pulls negative events to earth. He begs one to question the limits of reality, the possibility of alternate realities, and, if only temporarily, remodel our experience of today’s reality.

Galerie Perrotin
76, rue de Turenne
75003 Paris
Open: Sept. 6- Oct. 31 // Tuesday-Saturday 11am-7pm
Métro: St. Sébastien Froissard

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  1. David Goldblatt / Structures of Dominion and Democracy

Contrasting so many of Marian Goodman’s grand exhibitions, Structures of Dominion and Democracy sets up a subtle commentary on a piece of history that often goes untalked about. At the base of the exhibition stands one of Goldblatt’s major bodies of work, in which he explores architecture in colonial South Africa and its revelatory nature of the people and the times. Shortly after the rise to power of Nelson Mandela and democracy, Goldblatt began photographing new structures created by the new society, thus assembling a second series parallel to the first.

Side by side, the two series of soft black and white photographs point to stories of pain and rejuvenation in South Africa. The photographs appear almost hauntingly peaceful. They do not depict riots or acts of heinous violence, but instead quietly point to the aftermath of historical events of pain and unjust discrimination. Goldblatt once again reminds us of the ever-present human propensity towards war against one another.

Marian Goodman
79, rue du Temple
75003 Paris
Open: Sept. 6- Oct. 18 // Tuesday-Saturday 11am-7pm.
Métro: Rambuteau

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  1. Multiple Artists / Dans Un Intérieur

In perfect step with Paris Design Week, Gallerie Almine Rech poses the ever-relevant question on the boundary between art and function. This exhibition of furniture, murals, and textiles not only manifests as a colorful, aesthetically delicious discourse on design, but calls the viewer-turned-user in closer to the art to relate to on more domestic and personal terms.

When touching, moving, sitting on, walking on art, an emotional connection is immediately established between the artist and viewer, as that immediately the viewer/user has understood and come into proximity with the purpose of the creation.

Art Nouveau, Bauhaus, De Stijl. Throughout art history there stand distinctive periods where fine artists take function design into their agenda of work. Perhaps now is the dawn of yet another era.

*Featured Artists: John Armleder, Mark Barrow & Sarah Parke, Matthias Bitzer, John Currin, Ayan Farah, Frank Gehry, Mark Hagen, Max Lamb, Peter Peri, Christopher Schanck, Francesco Vezzoli, Brent Wadden, Franz West, and Japanese Boros.

Galerie Almine Rech
64, rue de Turenne
75003 Paris
Open: Sept. 6- Oct. 11 // Tuesday-Saturday 11am-7pm
Métro: Chemin Vert 

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Article by Amanda Hinton
Photos: Emma Gaudet