MASSIMODECARLO's Pièce Unique space in Paris has opened "Execution", a presentation centred on a new Yan Pei-Ming painting made specifically for the room. The work returns to Édouard Manet's "The Execution of Emperor Maximilian" — and, for the first time in the artist's career, renders the scene in red, dragging a nineteenth-century image of political violence into the present tense.

It is a characteristically direct move from Yan, the Shanghai-born, Dijon-based painter known for monumental portraits of power figures from Mao Zedong to Barack Obama, executed at speed with a mop-sized brush in wet-into-wet oil. His long-running dialogue with art history — Courbet at the Petit Palais, the Louvre's Mona Lisa funeral — finds a new chapter here in Manet's firing squad, repainted in the blood-red monochrome that has become one of his signature registers.

The show runs 13–24 October 2026, and upstairs the gallery's apartment hosts a counterpoint selection: Alighiero Boetti's embroideries submitting language to the grid, Jannis Kounellis binding charcoal and lead to iron with wire, and Danh Vo casting an antique wooden Saint Catherine in bronze.

The presentation is built around a single new painting made for the room, and Manet's Maximilian — a nineteenth-century scene of political violence — gives Yan unusually loaded source material. Rendering it in red, for the first time in his career, keeps its provocation alive in the present tense.

The announcement also confirms MASSIMODECARLO's Art Basel Paris lineup: booth B19 at the Grand Palais (20–25 October) with 25 artists including Yan himself alongside Elmgreen & Dragset, Carsten Höller, Matthew Wong, Dominique Fung and Giorgio Griffa.