© Fonds de dotation Villeglé ; Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois © The Saul Steinberg Foundation / Adagp, Paris, 2026 © Charlotte Gainsbourg
Paris may be the City of Love, but it’s above all a cultural capital! Art galleries are an excellent alternative to the endless queues at popular museums, and there are plenty to choose from. Free to visit and often blissfully uncrowded, they introduce us to underground artists and give us plenty of cultural talking points to show off at dinner parties. We’ve rounded up the free, inspiring exhibitions you won’t want to miss right now. On the programme: Charlotte Gainsbourg exhibits her photographs at Saint Laurent Rive Droite; graphic collages by Jacques Villeglé at Galerie Vallois; works by Saul Steinberg at Galerie Claude Bernard; abstract paintings by Monique Frydman at Dutko; and a celebration of love at Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger.
The Most Rock ’n’ Roll
Who says luxury boutiques can’t be art spaces? At Saint Laurent Rive Droite, Charlotte Gainsbourg presents 5bis, a series of photographs curated by Anthony Vaccarello. Following its showing at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival, a selection of images has found a home among YSL shoes and coats. The subject? Her father Serge Gainsbourg’s house at 5bis rue de Verneuil. Incredibly chic, but above all deeply moving: who hasn’t felt that pang of emotion when returning to their childhood home?
The actress and singer picked up her Hasselblad to photograph the legendary house just before it became a museum dedicated to her father’s life and work. The result is more than 20 intimate images that take us on a tour of the house, like revisiting a place we know by heart, where flashes of the past suddenly surface in the present. An added bonus: a beautiful limited-edition book published by Saint Laurent Éditions brings the series together (€95). Chic!
5bis, Charlotte Gainsbourg. Saint Laurent Rive Droite. 213 rue Saint-Honoré, Paris 1st arrondissement. From 24 September to 2 December 2026. Open Monday to Saturday, 10 am to 7.30 pm, and Sunday, 11 am to 7 pm.
© Charlotte Gainsbourg
The Most Romantic
Tucked away in a peaceful courtyard on rue de Saintonge, out of sight of passers-by, Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger is hosting Garden of Love, a group exhibition conceived by philosopher and art historian Guillaume Logé. Gallery artists and invited guests come together around a universal theme: love and its relationship with nature. Through photography, drawing, painting and sculpture, visitors wander among a diverse collection of works exploring this connection. What if love could reinvent itself by embracing nature? At the heart of the exhibition is the monumental work by Yang Jiechang, Tale of the Eleventh Day – Red Autumn: ten panels stretching nearly 14 metres in length, depicting a primordial landscape inhabited by animals and humans. It’s a nod to Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance.
Around it, you’ll encounter Léger, Max Ernst, Dufy and André Breton, alongside African, Egyptian and Indian art. From early art to contemporary works, an entire world comes together within these walls. Our favourites? Bonnard’s photograph, Marthe Standing Near a Chair, which shows an almost spectral figure emerging from nocturnal vegetation, and the photographs by Claude Mollard, which reveal strange presences in the most ordinary corners of nature. The perfect excuse for a lovely date with yourself.
Garden of Love. Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger. 5 rue de Saintonge, Paris 3rd arrondissement. From 3 October to 19 December 2026. Open Tuesday to Friday, 10 am to 7 pm, and Saturday, 11 am to 7 pm.
© Lin Zhipeng – Exhibition view of “Garden of Love”, 2026, Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris © Hervé Abbadie, Courtesy Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris-Lisbon © Yang Jiechang
The Most Graphic
Jacques Villeglé would have turned 100 this year. To celebrate the occasion, Galerie Vallois is dedicating a retrospective to the artist, marking his 15th solo exhibition with the gallery. His artistic approach involved tearing posters from Parisian walls and bringing them into the world of art. The result? Boldly graphic, slightly rock ’n’ roll collages steeped in Nouveau Réalisme. One detail we love: each work’s title specifies the street and date on which the poster was taken down, inviting visitors to play detective and track down the addresses.
Titled Jacques Villeglé, the Flâneur, the exhibition traces the full scope of the artist’s visual approach. It ranges from Pénélope (1950), his first experimental film project, to the self-portraits of Opération Quimpéroise (2006), taking in his torn posters, Ardoises and Placards de journaux, which are being shown at the gallery for the first time. It’s an appetiser for the exhibition at the Musée Carnavalet, Paris à l’arraché, devoted to Villeglé’s work and opening on 14 October. A double dose of culture guaranteed!
Jacques Villeglé, the Flâneur. Galerie Vallois. 33 & 36 rue de Seine, Paris 6th arrondissement. From 11 September to 31 October 2026. Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 am to 1 pm and 2 pm to 7 pm.
© Fonds de dotation Villeglé ; Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois
The Most Illustrative
Just around the corner, Galerie Claude Bernard brings together around 20 works by Saul Steinberg, created between 1951 and 1990. Born in Romania and trained as an architect, he collaborated with The New Yorker for nearly 60 years, producing around 90 covers for the magazine. His drawings have a comic-strip quality, full of humour, eccentric characters and improbable settings. But don’t be fooled: behind that deceptively childlike style lies a sharp satire of American society and its conventions.
The walls feature drawings, collages and assemblages combining wax crayon, watercolour, ink, coloured pencil, gouache and acrylic. Highlights include Times Square, The American Sphinx and Lex Pax Lux, as well as drawings that appeared on the cover of the American magazine. Often described as “a writer who draws”, Steinberg blends words and images into a language entirely his own. Discover his work in this second exhibition dedicated to him by the gallery, following the first in 2008.
Saul Steinberg. Galerie Claude Bernard. 7–9 rue des Beaux-Arts, Paris 6th arrondissement. From 17 September to 14 November 2026. Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10.30 am to 1 pm and 2.30 pm to 7 pm.
© The Saul Steinberg Foundation / Adagp, Paris, 2026
The Most Colourful
We round things off on a gentle, colourful note with États d’Âme by Monique Frydman at Dutko, on quai Voltaire. Born in 1943, this leading figure in French abstraction presents a previously unseen collection of paintings created between 2023 and 2026, marking her fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. These vivid abstract works give centre stage to texture and material, and inevitably invite us to view them through the lens of our own mood that day. That’s precisely the point: “Is a state of mind not the very subject of painting?” the artist asks.
To achieve these textural effects, Monique Frydman has, since the 1970s, developed a slow, meticulous process of impregnating linen, cotton, Japanese paper and tarlatan with pigments, pastels and binders. She also uses frottage: ropes or cords placed beneath the canvas leave their impressions on the surface, creating a subtle network of lines. In her recent series, the pastel pigments are diluted to produce an almost watercolour-like effect, at times quiet and contemplative, at others vibrant and luminous. Take a moment to admire these colours and shapes, and give yourself a little time to meditate during the day!
États d’Âme, Monique Frydman. Galerie Dutko. 17 quai Voltaire, Paris 7th arrondissement. From 1 October to 21 November 2026. Open Monday to Saturday, 10.30 am to 7 pm, and Sunday, 2 pm to 6 pm.
© Simon Jaton
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