In Paris, autumn lights up with art and design

Paris is gearing up for one of the most intense weeks on its cultural calendar. From 22 to 26 October 2025, the city transforms into a global crossroads for art, design and contemporary culture. Art Basel Paris returns for its second edition at the Grand Palais with 203 exhibitors from 40 countries, including 25 new galleries; while the third edition of Design Miami.Paris brings collectible design back into the refined setting of L’Hôtel de Maisons. Meanwhile, the wait is almost over for the new headquarters of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain - a Haussmannian building from 1855 whose interiors have been completely reconfigured by Jean Nouvel - officially opening on 25 October, just steps from the Louvre, with the exhibition Exposition Générale, featuring a spatial design by Formafantasma.


©Art Basel

At the Grand Palais, the beating heart of the city, Art Basel Paris confirms its role as an international platform capable of bringing established names and new generations into dialogue. The participating galleries - from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas - present an expanded vision of contemporary art, where hybrid languages, regenerative materials, and sustainable practices converge. The fair reaffirms itself as an unmissable event of the season, drawing collectors, curators, designers, and cultural professionals from around the world. Alongside Art Basel, the collectible design scene unfolds with Design Miami.Paris, hosted once again at L’Hôtel de Maisons. Here, leading international galleries - from Carpenters Workshop Gallery to Friedman Benda - showcase works that move between art, craft, and material innovation. It's a format that cements Paris as a capital of collectible design, where the culture of project-based thinking meets formal experimentation and auteur research.


Design/Miami.Pari 2024 - ©Ivan-Eorfeev for Design/Miami.Paris

But the true shift this season happens just a few streets away, where the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain opens its new headquarters inside the historic Grands Magasins du Louvre, in the heart of the Rive Droite. The 8,500 sqm interiors, completely redesigned by Atelier Jean Nouvel, rethink the museum as a living, dynamic organism: a transparent, modular structure, filled with natural light and organized across five movable platforms designed to adapt to different creative disciplines - from photography to science, cinema to performance. To celebrate its 40th anniversary, the foundation opens with a free-entry weekend (25–26 October) and the major exhibition Exposition Générale, gathering over 600 works by more than 100 international artists, including James Turrell, Claudia Andujar, David Lynch, and Cai Guo-Qiang. Conceived as a “living encyclopedia”, the exhibition unfolds across four thematic sections - Machines d’architecture, Être nature, Making Things, Un monde réel - tracing forty years of experimentation between architecture, nature, and technology, offering a new reading of the foundation’s creative archive.


©Fondation Cartier

The installation by Formafantasma reinterprets, in a poetic and critical way, the great 19th-century exhibitions that once animated the Grands Magasins du Louvre, transforming the memory of the site into an immersive scenography that reflects on today’s urgencies. As the Fondation Cartier states, the aim is to place art in direct dialogue with contemporary issues - from ecology to urban transformation to cultural coexistence - returning an experience where creation is not just representation but an act of shared reflection.


©Fondation Cartier

Founded in 1984 by Alain Dominique Perrin, then president of Maison Cartier, the foundation has always stood out as a meeting point between disciplines, embracing art as an open laboratory. Today, with its new headquarters, its identity shifts toward a fluid exhibition model, able to evolve over time, where each show becomes both a sensory and intellectual experience. With the temporary closure of the Centre Pompidou — reportedly for at least five years — for major renovation works, the Fondation Cartier strengthens its role as a new cultural infrastructure for Paris, symbol of an era in which the boundaries between art, architecture, and thought are dissolving to make space for new forms of dialogue.