5 installations not to miss at Art Basel Paris 2025 This week and until 26 October, the capital will be buzzing with must-see performances and installations

An inflated Kermit the Frog, an invisible drawing, your trash turned into treasure (or work of art): Paris Art Basel is definitely here. Beyond the main show at the Grand Palais, featuring 206 leading international galleries, including 180 in the Galeries sector and 65 exhibitors with spaces across Paris, the city itself becomes part of the entire program. This year’s Public Program spreads across nine Parisian venues, highlighting the fair’s deep ties to the city’s art and creative energy and its monumental cultural network. If you’re in Paris this week, here are the installations and exhibitions not to miss.

1. Objets Trouvés - Harry Nuriev

At the Chapelle des Petits-Augustins, Beaux-Arts de Paris presents Harry Nuriev’s latest participatory work, Objets Trouvés. The installation features neatly aligned supermarket boxes, soon to be filled with objects brought by visitors. Each participant is invited to leave behind something they no longer need and take something left by someone else — a kind of modern-day barter system. Every contribution is certified as a work of art, and by the end of the exhibition, all exchanges will be catalogued in a Yellow Pages-style directory, archiving this fleeting circulation of objects into permanence. Open from October 21 to 26, 10am to 7pm. Free entry.

2. The Singular Experience - Walter De Maria

A little outside Paris, but worth the trip. For the first time, American artist Walter De Maria’s Truck Trilogy is being shown outside the United States. The work echoes his Bel Air Trilogy but features three 1950s Chevrolet Advance Design pickup trucks. De Maria stripped away all nonessential elements (mirrors, windshield wipers, and other details) to reduce the vehicles to their pure sculptural form. In the bed of each truck stand three stainless steel rods — one circular, one square, one triangular — arranged in alternating sequences in each truck. The exhibition also includes other works by De Maria, such as 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows (1985) and his famous “invisible” drawings. Open now through April 18, 2026.

3. Kermit the Frog, Even - Alex Da Corte

The Place Vendôme has long been a stage for monumental and often provocative public art — from Urs Fischer’s melting candle figures to Paul McCarthy’s infamous Tree. This year, the square hosts Kermit the Frog, Even (2018) by Alex Da Corte. The title references Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923), also known as The Large Glass, while the work itself pays homage to the day a giant helium-filled balloon of Kermit the Frog snagged on a tree branch, tore open, and slumped half-deflated along Fifth Avenue during the 1991 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York. Both humorous and melancholic, Da Corte’s piece reimagines a beloved childhood figure through the lens of fragility and defeat.

4. Gerhard Richter at Fondation Louis Vuitton

Continuing its tradition of monographic exhibitions devoted to the world’s leading contemporary artists, the Fondation Louis Vuitton is presenting a major retrospective dedicated to Gerhard Richter, the German artist from Dresden, widely recognized as one of the most influential figures in contemporary art. The exhibition gathers 275 works spanning from 1962 to 2024, including his 2017 drawings — the year he announced his retirement from painting. Presented chronologically, it traces not only Richter’s artistic evolution through painting, sculpture, and installation, but also the deeply personal dimensions of his practice, through portraits of his daughters, women, and family members, as well as objects reflecting the changing realities of our world.

5. Exposition Générale at Fondation Cartier

The Fondation Cartier has now moved to its new address at 2, place du Palais Royal, permanently leaving its former glass and steel building on Boulevard Raspail. The inauguration of the new space opens with its first exhibition titled Exposition Générale, which brings together 600 works by over a hundred contemporary artists, including Damien Hirst, Joan Mitchell, and Bodys Isek Kingelez’s Project pour le Kinhasa du troisième millénaire, reimagining a futuristic Congolese capital that translates his vision of utopia — small secular states existing without police or army. Members of the Guarani and Nivacle Indigenous communities, artists from the Gran Chaco forest in northern Paraguay, also present 14 works raising awareness about the effects of deforestation on Indigenous peoples and the world at large.