Paris Art Picks: Monthly Highlights
Great exhibitions do more than display art—they leave a lasting impression. They create moments that stay with you, whether through striking visuals, resonant cultural narratives, or the shared experiences they cultivate. So far this year, I’ve chosen one standout exhibit from each month, shaping the first chapter of my 2025 art journey.
January
PASSAGE, Étienne Rougery-Herbaut
Étienne Rougery-Herbaut’s interdisciplinary approach intertwines installation and photography, transforming dreams into physical entities that interrogate space and memory. He delves into time and perception with Passage, a convergence of sculptures, photographs, and immersive installations.
At the heart of the exhibition is L’Échelle, a photographic series in which a ladder stands rooted in various points across the Moroccan desert. Framed in shifting light and shadow, it becomes a marker of nature’s rhythms and a meditation on impermanence. A tool of connection and ascent, the ladder leads only to the open sky, recontextualized as a symbol of contemplation. Time is measured not in minutes but in moments—each photograph titled after the precise hour of its capture, suspending the ephemeral within a defined interval.
The ladder's measurable dimensions remain ambiguous in many of the photographs. It is only when traces of human presence emerge—a distant traveler crossing the frame, footprints imprinted in the sand—that our perception of scale and distance adjusts. These subtle markers instantly recalibrate the spatial dynamic, and reveal our position within the landscape.
The exhibition also includes a series of surrealist black-and white photographs with a Magritte-like visual language. The carefully composed scenes feature doors, curtains, chairs—everyday objects detached from their usual context and reinterpreted—set against enigmatic seascapes. These objects take on an otherwordly presence, suspended between the tangible and the imagined.
Bringing it all together is an immersive installation merging the two photographic series. Large, open curtains invite viewers into a sand-filled space with a statuesque ladder ascending to the ceiling, mirroring its symbolic presence in the photographs.
Rougery-Herbaut’s exhibition does not claim to provide ultimate truths. Instead, it poses questions: What does it mean to capture time? What does it mean to stand still within it? Passage offers an invitation to pause, observe, and engage with the ever-evolving dialogue between the ephemeral and the eternal.
As someone with Haitian heritage—and more specifically, as a curator specialized in contemporary Haitian art—experiencing Zombis : La mort n’est pas une fin ? [English translation: Zombis. Death is not the end] was both deeply personal and profoundly illuminating. This exhibition finally places the cultural figure of the zombi in its rightful historical context—not as an invention of horror films, but as a reflection of Haiti’s spiritual, social, and political realities. Here, the zombi is not a monster, it’s a mirror: a reflection of colonial history, cultural resistance, and the persistence of collective memory.
The exhibition begins with the roots of Haitian Vodou, a synthesis of West and Central African spiritual traditions, indigenous Taíno beliefs, and Catholicism. Through objects, clothing, vévés (symbolic floor drawings used in Haitian Vodou rituals made of cornmeal, ash, or flour), and even an immersive reconstruction of a ceremonial room, the vibrant textures of Vodou are vividly brought to life.
The exhibition introduces the Bizango societies—keepers of justice beyond the colonial courts—who punished criminals by zombifying them. Individuals who betrayed community values were poisoned, buried alive, declared dead, exhumed, and brought back into servitude: alive, but stripped of identity and agency. We see this story unfold through a wide range of works: ritual garments, embroidered banners, and fétiches (sacred ritual objects believed to hold spiritual power)—building a layered portrait of Vodou as a rich, complex faith.
In its final section, the exhibition shifts to the global gaze, where Hollywood transformed the zombi into a contagious, monstrous “other.” Stripped of its origins and commodified through popular media, the zombi has been endlessly reinvented—appropriated not as the culturally grounded figure rooted in Haitian Vodou and postcolonial resistance, but as a vessel for Western anxieties.
The exhibition underscores a central tenet of Haitian cosmology: death is not disappearance—it is transformation. Spirits remain active, watching over the living, participating in the rhythms of daily life and the evolution of collective identity. Zombis leaves us with an enduring ancestral affirmation: the line between life and death is not a boundary, but a thread, connecting past and present through memory, ritual, and spirit.
The Salon is a contemporary homage to the gatherings of the same name that once animated the literary and artistic circles of early modern France. At once social and intellectual, these were forums where culture was not only consumed but constructed. Art, literature, and philosophy were discussed among progressive tastemakers, playing a vital role in shaping Enlightenment thought and artistic movements.
Lauren Gardner, founder of The Salon, revives this tradition with invitation-only exhibitions in women’s homes across New York, London, and Paris—presenting art in a setting that emphasizes intimacy, insight, and connection. These events honor the legacy of the salonnière—influental women who served as cultural stewards, cultivating discourse through taste, critique, and conversation.
This iteration presented La Chambre des Femmes, an exhibition title evoking both a private space and a collective realm—a nod to Virginia Woolf’s iconic assertion that women should claim spaces of their own in pursuit of creative autonomy. Curated by Vivienne Mueller, this exhibition brings together works by Valeria Sarto, Phoebe Howard, and Axelle Roth le Gentil, whose practices collectively engage the interplay between body, mind, representations of femininity.
Sarto’s photographic series À La Folie captures moments of feminine introspection and emotional unraveling. Her subjects are captured in the space between stillness and release, where the internal begins to manifest through gaze, posture, or gesture.
Howard’s paper sculptures and cut-outs interrogate gender and gaze through imagined narratives, blending personal mythology with art historical allusions. Infused with fragile materiality and doll-like artifice, her works position femininity as a performed and precarious state.
Roth le Gentil’s drawings and paintings evoke sensuality and subtle dissonance, tracing the mutable expressiveness of form and figure. Through distortions of the familiar and ambiguous symbolism, she constructs dreamscapes that explore memory, desire, and escape.
Attendees are young professionals and creatives in their twenties and early thirties, working across the worlds of art, culture, and fashion. The atmosphere is lively and inviting—complete with food, music, and lots of wine—resembling a dinner party as much as an art opening, encouraging mingling, networking, and new friendships. The evening also included a guided tour of the home and private collection of the exhibition’s host, an avid art collector who shared the stories behind her carefully curated space. With the artists in attendance, we were invited to engage directly—asking questions and discussing the inspiration behind works. That night, several works were acquired on the spot, a testament to The Salon’s mission of elevating emerging talent.
