With Art Basel Paris at the Grand Palais in full swing, the gravitational pull of Paris Art Week has again been rippling far beyond its main fair. From the Champs-Élysées to the Marais, a constellation of smaller fairs is revealing the city’s true creative temperature.
Paris Internationale and Asia Now—both celebrating their 10th anniversaries—anchor the week with distinct visions: one focused on human-scale independence, the other on plural, borderless Asias. Newcomers 7 rue Froissart and Upstairs Art Fair bring a sense of community and irreverence to the Paris art scene, while Detroit Salon, a citywide contemporary art show launching in Detroit in 2028, embarks on a three-year global roadshow with its first stop in Paris. Boundary-pushing and defiantly independent, these satellites are where the next chapter of contemporary art is being written.
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If Art Basel is the establishment, Paris Internationale is its counterpoint. Founded in 2015 by gallerists Ciaccia Levi, Crèvecœur, and Gregor Staiger who wanted “to redefine what an art fair could be,” as director Silvia Ammon explained to ARTnews, the fair is now a cornerstone of Paris Art Week. This year’s 11th edition unites 59 galleries and seven non-profit spaces from 19 countries—a reduction of nine exhibitors from 2024—to “ensure breathing room for each project and allow a more fluid and reflective visitor experience,” Ammon said. It also marks a move to the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées—just steps from where it all began—revealing the fair’s nomadic nature that sees it change location almost annually, with plans for a Milan edition in 2026.
“Paris was regaining momentum a decade ago, but younger, more experimental galleries lacked visibility,” Ammon said. “We wanted to create a fair that felt human, independent, and artist-centered rather than formatted and corporate.”
Centrale Lecoeur at Paris Internationale 2025.
Photo Margot Montigny/Courtesy Paris Internationale
That spirit still defines Paris Internationale today. Designed by architects Christ & Gantenbein as a “micro-city,” the fair’s layout fosters movement and conversation rather than hierarchy. Its new ♡PI10 program celebrates 10 years of artistic exchange through large-scale interventions and collaborations, while its Daily Dérives tours encourage visitors to wander, guided by artists, curators, or collectors.
In a slower market, Ammon sees opportunity for the fair’s exhibitors. “What matters most is trust, quality, and community,” she said. “We’ve cultivated a loyal network of galleries, curators, and collectors who value our integrity and the quality of dialogue. In that sense, Paris Internationale is perhaps better positioned than larger, more corporate fairs to navigate a moment of transition.”
The fair remains refreshingly non-profit with reasonable participation fees and free admission—not because it’s easy, but because accessibility, Ammon insisted, “is essential to keeping art a space of discovery, not privilege.”
“Every euro earned is reinvested into the next edition. Our independence allows us to take risks and keep the focus on artists and galleries,” she added.
Across the Seine, at the Monnaie de Paris, Asia Now returns with the aptly titled theme “Grow.” The mission of Europe’s first fair dedicated entirely to Asian contemporary art “is to show that a fair can be a space of collective growth, creativity, and care; it’s about dreaming of living under the same sky,” founding director Alexandra Fain told ARTnews.
“When Asia Now began in 2015, the European market was still very compartmentalized,” Fain said. “Asian contemporary art was often represented in fragments—very much from a Western perspective, with a strong focus on the ‘Chinese bubble.’ There was room for something deeper, more genuine.” Her answer was to create a platform reflecting “the diversity and vitality of Asian art on its own terms.”
A decade later, Asia Now has tripled in size—from 18 galleries in 2015 to 68 participants today—spanning a vast cultural geography, from Central Asia to the Pacific, including Lahore, Colombo, Riyadh, and Tashkent.
“Regions once considered peripheral are now shaping global art discourse,” Fain said. “Our vision of plural Asias affirms that contemporary creation is inherently interconnected—it’s about building affective communities across geography, history, and imagination.”
This year’s edition foregrounds West and South Asia, positioning them not as margins but as dynamic centers, with curatorial contributions from John Tain, Anissa Touati, Natasha Ginwala, and Hajra Haider.
Asia Now feels less like a trade event and more like a festival. New projects include performances by Saudi artist Ahaad Alamoudi and the Lahore Biennale Foundation’s visions of ecological awareness by Hamra Abbas, Imran Qureshi, Feroza Hakeem, and Fazal Rizvi. Visitors witness a haunting ritual staged by Pakistani artist-activist Abuzar Madhu confronting the slow death of Lahore’s polluted River Ravi and Chinese artist Han Mengyun’s performative installation mixing poetry and video to evoke the quiet majesty of the moon, following her residency in AlUla in Saudi Arabia.
An installation view of Lê Thuy’s “Celestial body” series.
Anthony Phuong of A2Z Art Gallery told ARTnews that the gallery has participated in every iteration of Asia Now given its importance to collectors visiting from Asia. Showing artists Lê Thuy, Oanh Phi Phi, Tran Trong Vu, and Bùi Công Khánh, Phuong called Vietnam’s art market “one of the most promising in Asia that has reached a level of maturity that deserves the attention of Western collectors,” with a new generation of Vietnamese collectors ready to engage both locally and internationally.
“Asia Now is a fair of trust and courage—putting forward a selection of the best artists from all over Asia who remain underrepresented in France,” yet are very present within biennales, triennales, festivals, fairs, or institutions in Asia, Phuong added.
Another regular at Asia Now, Singapore’s Yeo Workshop presents a poetic pairing of Anum and Filippo Sciascia, whose paintings and sculptures examine memory, materiality, and Asia as a site of belonging.
“Even with the market slowdown, art, its promotion, and the connections it fosters must continue,” founder Audrey Yeo told ARTnews. “Paris feels alive with energy right now. Asia Now’s strong educational programs help contextualize our artists’ stories for an engaged audience eager to listen.”
She noted the fair’s strength in attracting top institutional figures, with representatives from the Centre Pompidou, Cernuschi Museum, MAC Lyon, Singapore Art Museum, Zabludowicz Collection, and the Saudi Museum of Contemporary Art, alongside Tate patrons and curators Cosmin Costinas and Catherine David among those in attendance.
Across town, Paris-based dealer Brigitte Mulholland and New York gallerist Sara Maria Salamone decided to act fast when NADA abruptly canceled the 2025 edition of its Paris salon in mid-July.
“I had to find an alternative exhibition for my artist,” Mulholland told ARTnews. “I figured—there are so many amazing pop-up spaces in Paris, I could easily find one and get a group of galleries together.”
The result is 7 rue Froissart, a free-to-attend, unbranded, and unsponsored fair in a Marais space with works ranging from €2,000 to €40,000.
“It’s about transparency, collaboration, and access—not exclusivity or competition,” Salamone said. With 11 galleries including Mrs., Marinaro, Dimin, Chilli, The Black Chip, and Schwarz Contemporary, the event is a DIY antidote to the corporate fair format.
“Fellow galleries are colleagues,” added Mulholland. “So many traditional fairs have responsibilities to investors and need to make a profit; the galleries are not necessarily the main priority anymore.”
Crucially, 7 rue Froissart operates without investors or the prohibitive pricing of major fairs. “Everyone splits the costs equally,” Mulholland explained. “There is no business model. I’ll probably lose money on it, but it feels important to show that there are alternatives to the chokehold traditional models have on the art world.” For Salamone, it’s about reconnecting with purpose. “The slowdown has brought us back to community and sustainability,” she observed. “Buying art should be joyful, not pressured.”
The lineup is as lively as its founding story: performances by Mariana Hahn, the Wet Gala by Kahlos Éphémère—a drag satire of the Met Gala—and a collective sculpture show in the basement.
“We don’t always need to take the art world so seriously,” Mulholland said. “There’s fun to be had—and we should celebrate the craziness of what we do.”
Meanwhile, Upstairs Art Fair has arrived in Paris’s 10th arrondissement for its first European edition since launching in 2017. Founded by Bill Powers and Erin Goldberger of Half Gallery, the fair, previously held in Amagansett, has gained a reputation as a hothouse for new talent. The Paris edition consists of a three-suite takeover at graffiti artist André’s Hôtel Grand Amour.
“There’s something romantic about a suitcase show,” Powers told ARTnews of the three-gallery micro fair. “The Armory Show started as a boutique fair in a hotel—it had great energy and a sense of renegade unity.” Here, galleries pay no booth fees. “Simply rent a room and handle logistics yourself,” Powers said. “I think many art dealers struggle doing fairs by needing to bring more expensive work to break even or turn a profit, which limits their point of entry or range of art exhibited.”
An installation view of one of the guest-room presentations at Upstairs Art Fair in Paris.
Sean Fader/Courtesy Upstairs Art Fair
Inside the hotel’s pink-walled guestrooms, the presentations feel confidential and a little mischievous, reminding everyone that sometimes the best art hangs above a hotel bed. Sarah Daoui launched Bureau.Art with India Sachi’s European debut—a deeply personal show about childhood, travel, and transformation. Dealer Megan Mulrooney and artist Maria Szakats turn another suite into a dialogue of corners, folds, and cavities, while Half Gallery showcases figurative and abstract paintings by Andie Dinkin, Daniel Heidkamp, Angela China, and others in the penthouse.
“The works almost congeal with the hotel itself,” Half Gallery’s Goldberger said. “Each room giving great thought to what would be presented.”
Powers too sees the current market as an advantage for some galleries. “People are anxious about a soft art market,” he said. “But sales below $20,000 are relatively strong.” Upstairs’s setting attracts a cool, unpretentious crowd: “You might bump into Hailey Benton Gates in the courtyard or crash a Purple magazine dinner in the lobby,” Powers added.
In an art world dominated by mega-fairs and mega-sales, Paris’s satellites thrive on something else: intimacy, inclusivity, experimentation, and belief.
