FLASH EXPOS : Top 5 in Paris
Flash expos are lighting up Paris this summer, turning the city into a playground of bold art, raw emotion, and flashes of genius. From iconic institutions to offbeat project spaces, the city’s cultural energy is unstoppable. In particular, these five quick-hit exhibitions offer fresh voices, timeless forms, and visceral beauty. Moreover, each show invites viewers to experience art in unexpected ways. Additionally, they reveal how contemporary artists are reshaping familiar narratives and challenging perception. Whether you’re a seasoned collector or a curious newcomer, there’s something here to spark your imagination. Consequently, here’s where to go and why right now is the perfect time to catch these flash expos.
1. FLASH EXPO : Elizabeth Peyton: La Pesanteur et la Grâce & Huma Bhabha: Distant Star
David Zwirner Gallery – 108, rue Vieille du Temple, 75003 Paris
Elizabeth Peyton: April 24 to June 28, 2025
Huma Bhabha: June 13 to July 26, 2025
Step into David Zwirner Paris, a luminous art haven in Le Marais. As you enter, the glass roof and expansive white cube immediately set the stage for a striking double feature.
First, Elizabeth Peyton brings her signature intimacy in La Pesanteur et la Grâce. Her faces, fragile and radiant, seem to hover between now and forever. Moreover, her light brushstrokes contrast beautifully with the weight of emotion they carry. Meanwhile, the exhibition invites viewers to pause, reflect, and perhaps even feel suspended in time. Ultimately, it’s an encounter that lingers well beyond the gallery walls.
In contrast, Huma Bhabha: Distant Star presents six powerful sculptures and new large-scale drawings. As the exhibition unfolds, themes of war, decay, and memory emerge through raw materials like clay, cork, and salvaged skulls. A towering iron figure greets visitors like a sentinel from another time, immediately setting a solemn tone. Furthermore, each piece reveals layers of erosion, evoking both destruction and rebirth in equal measure. Her hooded portraits, made from ink and collage, suggest saints, ghosts, and street culture all at once. Consequently, these hybrid forms blur the lines between human, animal, and alien. Altogether, this must-see flash expo marks Bhabha’s Paris return as haunting, bold, and deeply relevant.
Two women. Two worlds. One gallery not to miss in this season’s flash expos.
2. Jeanne Vicerial: Nymphoses
Galerie Templon (Beaubourg) – 30 rue Beaubourg, 75003 Paris
May 17 to July 19, 2025
At Galerie Templon, Jeanne Vicerial builds bodies out of black thread. As visitors move through Nymphoses, they encounter a show that is part sculpture, part ritual, and part skin-shedding.
These massive forms are hand-crocheted into being and pulse with memory and transformation. Moreover, Vicerial takes the idea of the “nymph” and flips it, no longer passive or pretty, but strong, strange, and evolving. In addition, her work challenges traditional representations of femininity with tactile precision and symbolic power. Ultimately, this is a must-see for fans of textile art, mythology, and transformation in Paris’s vibrant scene of flash expos.
3. FLASH EXPO : Mickael Vis: L’Abri et la Tempête
Possibly Sometime Tomorrow, 78 Rue des Archives, 75003, Paris
May 29 to June 15, 2025
“Family is a shelter in the storm. In fact, family is the storm itself.
But at what point does the intimate cross its boundaries to become a collective work?Through the use of mediums such as photography, archives, and text, Mickael Vis thoughtfully explores the fine line that defines what he calls the balance of things—and in doing so, he invites each of us to question our own.
By sharing a deeply personal family story, he encourages us to rethink traditional family patterns. Consequently, his work becomes political—a tension between norms, roles, and inheritances.
Moreover, he evokes the tensions between documentary gaze and the aesthetics of disappearance, while also touching on the sacred—that which surrounds parental figures, their central and symbolic place in our intimate construction.
Ultimately, this exhibition proposes a journey through thresholds: those of the visible and the forgotten, the individual and the collective, the shelter and the storm.”
– Mickael Vis
4. Alberto Magnelli
Galerie Patrice Trigano – 4 bis rue des Beaux-Arts, 75006 Paris
May 7 to June 28, 2025
Sometimes, less is more. At Galerie Patrice Trigano, the abstract works of Alberto Magnelli hum with quiet energy.
As viewers step into the space, they are immediately drawn into a dialogue between stillness and motion. Indeed, Magnelli, a pioneer of modernism, blends form and color into visual poetry that continues to resonate.
Furthermore, his geometric shapes float like jazz, balanced, rhythmic, and undeniably alive. As a result, the exhibition offers a rare chance to reflect on how 20th-century abstraction still speaks to the present moment. In a season overflowing with stimulation, this show provides a breath of clarity among the city’s many flash expos.
5. FLASH EXPO : Jean-Baptiste Caron: Forces en présence
Galerie 22,48m² – 29 rue de la Commune de Paris, 93230 Romainville
May 23 to July 19, 2025
Head just outside Paris to Romainville, where Jean-Baptiste Caron is bending time and logic. As visitors enter Forces en présence, curated by Henri Guette, they immediately sense a shift, something imperceptible yet palpable.
Here, the invisible becomes sculpture. Indeed, objects balance in improbable ways, glass appears to breathe, and space feels electrically charged. Moreover, Caron’s work is both poetic and scientific, a delicate dance of forces you can’t always name but undeniably feel. Consequently, the show invites reflection on gravity, fragility, and the strange beauty of tension. Without a doubt, this is one of the season’s sharpest flash expos.
Final Word
From poetic portraits to shapeshifting nymphs, these five flash exhibitions offer a full range of artistic emotions, quick to visit, yet impossible to forget. Furthermore, each show reveals a unique facet of Paris’s ever-evolving creative pulse. Whether you’re drawn to haunting sculptures, delicate abstractions, or transformative textile forms, there’s something to stir every sensibility. As a result, these exhibitions don’t just reflect the times, they shape them. So, don’t miss your chance to see Paris at its most electric, intimate, and raw this summer.
Want some more ? Take a look at : New art meets old in Galerie Jaeckin’s exhibition «Pop Corner»
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Amélie JOUISON is a fashion photographer and art director.
She likes to question the status of the image as a woman, incorporating a point of humour, burlesque and creating discomfort.
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