Beyond Basel: What to See in Paris This Art Week

As Art Basel Paris takes over the Grand Palais this week, the city offers a broad range of exhibitions and design events that stretch art’s definition, inviting visitors to listen, touch and inhabit it. For those seeking inspiration beyond the Basel booths, here’s where to find it.

Minimal, Bourse de Commerce 

October 8, 2025 – January 19, 2026 

Minimal explores the trajectory and diversity of minimalist works and movements around the world since the 1960s. It showcases works by artists from the Japanese Mono-ha movement, Italian Arte Povera, and Brazilian Neo-Concrete. Lee Ufan’s work is also featured (for an interview with Mr Lee, pick up a copy of Mastermind 18). The exhibition was created in collaboration with Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art Foundation. Several works come from artists regularly showcased at Dia’s American locations, including Walter De Maria, Richard Serra and Donald Judd. 

Offscreen Paris, Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière 

October 21-26, 2025

Offscreen’s 4th edition takes place in La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, a space that impresses its audience as much as the works featured in the show. Once a 17th-century hospice for “degenerate” women, later a 19th-century center for neurological and mental health studies, the chapel has also hosted performances by Bill Viola and Nan Goldin. This week, Offscreen Paris has converted it into a stage for diverse artistic voices, showcasing a range of avant-garde, historical and contemporary pieces. This year’s fair honors Shigeko Kubota and her pioneering work in video art and the fluxus movement. Plus, Mastermind is the event’s premium media partner, so the magazine can vouch for its quality. 

30 Blizzards by Helen Marten and Miu Miu, Palais d’Iéna

October 22-26, 2025

Helen Marten’s 30 Blizzards, presented in collaboration with Miu Miu at the Palais d’Iéna, explores how different mediums resonate when brought into dialogue. The exhibition is structured around five sculptures and five newly conceived videos, each loosely reflecting stages of life: from childhood and community to sexuality, reflection and loss. In addition, two panel conversations titled Pleasure Image, Pleasure Text will take place on October 22, highlighting Marten’s approach to language as an integral, shaping force in her work and featuring distinguished panellists, like poet Bhanu Kapil, writer Vanessa Onwuemezi and psychoanalyst and poet Nuar Alsadir.

Design Miami Paris, 51 Rue de l’Université 

October 21–26, 2025

Art Basel Paris isn’t the only art fair happening this week. Design Miami holds its third edition in Paris, showcasing artworks from 27 galleries. The fair takes place in the beautiful Parisian hôtel particulier previously owned by Karl Lagerfeld. The fair is primarily focused on furniture and antiques, from rare Alberto Giacometti lamps to Rick Owens designs.

CONTRIBUTIONS Design, located in various venues around the city. 

October 20 – 24, 2025

CONTRIBUTIONS Design returns for its second edition, transforming five Parisian venues into a symphony of sound and art. Founded by Anna Caradeuc and Élise Daunay, the festival partners musicians with designers, creating unique pieces of work that fuse together the two mediums, each object becoming an instrument. Highlights include Emily Thurman’s poetic rocking chairs adorned with bells strung, accompanied by a score from Kevin Morby and Pauline Esparon’s translucent parchment works with Juliette Teste’s ceramics and Michelle Blades’ ethereal compositions. 

Exposition Générale, Fondation Cartier

October 25, 2025 – August 23, 2026 

Fondation Cartier opens the doors of its new Jean Nouvel-designed space in the Palais Royal, presenting nearly 600 works by more than 100 artists. The exhibition unfolds across four key themes: architecture as a laboratory; nature and the non-human; the blurred boundaries between art, craft and design; and the intersection of art, technology and science. The project preserves the building’s Haussmannian façade while reimagining its interior as a flexible, versatile space for contemporary art exhibitions. Together, these works revisit Fondation Cartier’s legacy, drawing on its archives while creating a dialogue between the institution’s history and their new space.

Echo Delay Reverb, Palais de Tokyo 

October 22, 2025 – February 15, 2026

ECHO DELAY REVERB: American Art, Francophone Thought dives into the creative dialogue between American artists and French-speaking thinkers from the 1970s to current day. Showcasing works from more than 60 artists, the exhibition traces how the philosophical ideas of Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant resonate through generations of artists, including Dan Graham, Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon and Tiona Nekkia McClodden. The show reveals a conversation between art and theory, exposing how cultural exchange continues to shape the way we see the world and talk about it.

En plein coeur, Maison Guerlain 

22 October – 16 November, 2005

The basement of a perfume store on the Champs-Élysées might not be the most obvious place to find a world-class art exhibition, but Guerlain has curated an exceptional show on the theme of love, to mark 100 years of its fragrance, Shalimar. The exhibition includes video of Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s performance of Imponderabilia, in which they stand naked opposite one another in a doorway, while museum guests pass between them. There’s a tender 1975 David Hockney photo of his then-partner, Peter Schlesinger, showering. There’s work by Pablo Picasso, Ren Hang, Robert Mapplethorpe, Niki de Saint Phalle and John Giorno, and also several pieces by young artists. Amours solitaires, by Morgane Ortin, is a series of smartphones mounted to the wall, displaying flirty messages from an archive of 350,000 messages she has collected since 2017. For several of the works, Guerlain has made accompanying scents, which you can smell from red boxes mounted next to the works. For Ortin’s piece, the fragrance is inspired by the scent of tears.