With Paris Art Week 2026 about to begin, Artsy has released a guide to ten fairs, exhibitions and gallery presentations worth seeing across the French capital during the city's busiest art week of the year.

The centerpiece is Art Basel Paris, which runs October 21–25 at the Grand Palais in its fifth edition and its first under new director Karim Crippa, with 211 exhibitors from 41 countries. The guide also rounds up the satellite fairs that have made the week a destination in its own right: Paris Internationale (October 21–25), Asia Now at the Monnaie de Paris (October 20–24, its twelfth edition devoted to contemporary Asian art), AKAA at the Carreau du Temple (October 23–25, focused on African and diasporic art), and Post-Fair on Rue du Temple (October 19–24) with 34 solo and duo presentations.

On the museum and gallery front, the guide highlights Tracey Emin's first solo exhibition at White Cube's Paris space, featuring new paintings and bronze sculptures following her Tate Modern survey, and Jenny Holzer's text-based exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay, conceived in collaboration with the museum and drawing on artists' letters and period literature from its 1848–1914 holdings. The Holzer show includes an LED sign running through four galleries, engraved stone benches and columns, and light projections on the museum's Seine-facing exterior from October 18 to 22. A Mary Cassatt retrospective of nearly 80 paintings, pastels and prints opens at the same museum.

The week's public art is anchored by Art Basel's public program (October 21–25): Kutluğ Ataman's celebrated video environment Küba (2005), with 40 monitors showing residents of a demolished Istanbul settlement, at the Beaux-Arts de Paris; three monumental Tracey Emin bronzes on the Parvis des Droits-de-l'Homme; Alice Diop's Geste de Consolation, presented by Miu Miu, at the Palais d'Iéna; plush-animal works by Cosima von Bonin at the Petit Palais; and a line of monumental sculptures along the Avenue Winston Churchill.