Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin presents Nymphäum, an exhibition of more than twenty new paintings by Anselm Kiefer. The title refers to ancient sanctuaries dedicated to nymphs; Kiefer reimagines these figures from classical mythology through layered paint, collage, gold leaf, shellac, and sediment of electrolysis. Works such as Klytia (2025), Die Oreaden (2025), Actaea (2021–25), Daphne (2025), and Carya (2025) place nymphs in both pastoral and urban settings, including cityscapes with gold-leaf windows. Dense, textured surfaces and materials evoke cycles of destruction and rebirth, alchemical transformation, and the entanglement of figure and landscape. Two painted screens and aquatic scenes further explore the themes of refuge, metamorphosis, and the natural world reclaiming human-made environments. The exhibition continues Kiefer’s long-standing engagement with myth, history, and material process.

Anselm Kiefer: Nymphäum / Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin. Paris (France), October 21, 2026.

Press text (excerpt):

Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin presents Nymphäum, an exhibition of new works by Anselm Kiefer. Across more than 20 paintings, the artist orchestrates richly layered paint and collaged elements to reimagine narratives sourced from classical mythology. The title of the exhibition translates as ‘nymphaeum’, referring to sanctuaries consecrated to the nymphs in ancient Greece and Rome. Kiefer transforms the gallery into his own painterly nymphaeum: a new chapter in the interweaving of myth and matter that has defined his practice for more than five decades.

Kiefer amasses and continually reworks motifs as tools to excavate the depths of human history. In this new body of work, he turns his attention to nymphs: embodiments of nature rooted in classical mythology and yet urgently contemporary. These figures become conduits for an idea at the heart of Kiefer’s artmaking: humanity’s profound entanglement with the cycles of the natural world. Some of Kiefer’s nymphs occupy bucolic settings reminiscent of their classical origins, while others inhabit distinctly modern worlds. In a group of vertiginous cityscapes, Kiefer replaces his signature desolate landscapes with welcoming façades, their glowing windows rendered with meticulous gold leaf in grid-like arrangements, which curator Corinna Thierolf compares in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition to both Byzantine mosaics and Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907–8). Inspired by the light falling through the trees of New York’s Central Park, the artist identified in the most urban of settings a space for the otherworldly.

Vine-like profusions scar the foregrounds of these paintings, rendered so texturally that they appear to pierce the canvas, sprouting through it as if reclaiming the man-made world. Across Kiefer’s work, nature battles to take back ravaged terrains in a metaphor for the inevitability of cyclical destruction and rebirth against the backdrop of the scarred landscape of post-war, post-industrial Europe. The sweeping lineup of mountain nymphs in the monumental Die Oreaden (2025), standing at almost eight metres in width, translates the idyllic twilight scene of William Bouguereau’s Les Oréades (1902) into bleak, shadowy mountains below a burnished sky. While Kiefer’s concrete high-rises and hostile landscapes appear inhospitable to spirits of nature, his dense, impasto surfaces seem to offer them fleeting shelter. Also on view in the exhibition are two painted triptych screens, described by Thierolf as ‘providing protection for the nymphs – as if the painter wanted to offer the ephemeral beings refuge for a short while, albeit fully aware that even the slightest breath of air would be enough to drive them away again.’

Rivers have long run through Kiefer’s practice as a foundational motif, carrying, as Min Jung Kim, curator of the artist’s 2025–26 exhibition at Saint Louis Art Museum, writes, ‘historical, mythological, and symbolic weight’. Several of the works on view retrace the myths of Naiads, Nereids and Oceanids. In Thetis (2022–25), Nikaia (2025) and Actaea (2021–25), the titular nymphs bathe in dark waters or dissolve into their aquatic surroundings. Kiefer renders these scenes through sumptuous layers of paint and collaged canvas, making the works themselves appear as if they had been physically submerged in the very silt and history of the waters he depicts. The language of material plays an essential role in Kiefer’s work, and across the exhibition, highly symbolic connections emerge from shellac and chalk, collaged straw and charcoal. Kiefer also employs sediment of electrolysis – the jade-coloured residue left behind when metal is exposed to an electrical current – like paint, applying it generously to his canvases to denote foliage or water. Like the opulent gold leaf that Kiefer uses to represent the sky or light, this sediment recalls alchemical processes for the transmutation of matter into gold, a recurring influence in the artist’s work. In Kiefer’s words: ‘Alchemy is a symbol for the artist… you have to destroy and then recreate.’

In Nymphäum, such transformation finds expression in subject as well as in material. The artist depicts nymphs in metamorphosis, a key theme in classical literature. In Daphne (2025), the eponymous river nymph materialises from the laurel tree into which she was transformed in Ovid’s account. In Carya (2025), the bloom-like face of the titular nymph emerges from the leaves of the walnut tree that bears her transfigured form. Almost camouflaged among the textural surfaces, they appear as if born directly from dynamic material reactions on the canvases. The disembodied faces recall the portraits that Kiefer suspended in his landscapes of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a compositional strategy through which, as art historian Sabine Schütz wrote, ‘landscape turns into a soulscape’. Watching over the natural world, the nymphs weave a connection between figure and nature, and interior and exterior realms, softening the frontiers between landscape and portraiture. This collapse of figure and ground animates the works’ stratified ‘earth’, which becomes, as Thierolf writes, ‘a place of remembrance: overgrown, closed, but not silent’.

Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany. In 1992, he moved to France, where he lives and works between Paris and Barjac near Avignon. The artist studied law, literature and linguistics before attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, and later in Düsseldorf, where he was a student of Joseph Beuys. He was selected for the West German Pavilion at the 39th Venice Biennale in 1980. He was presented the Praemium Imperiale Award by Japan in 1999, and in 2008 he received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In 2007 he was the first artist since Georges Braque to have a permanent installation commissioned for the Louvre in Paris, and in 2018 his site-specific sculpture Uraeus was exhibited in front of the Rockefeller Center, New York. In 2020, he was the first artist to make permanent works for the Pantheon in Paris. In 2022, concurrently with the 59th Venice Biennale, he also presented a major installation in the Palazzo Ducale, Venice.

Kiefer’s works have been shown in prominent solo exhibitions internationally, including at the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1984); Art Institute of Chicago (1987); Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1991); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1998); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2001); Guggenheim Bilbao (2007); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2014); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015); Bibliothèque nationale de France (2015); Albertina, Vienna (2016); State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (2017); Rodin Museum, Paris (2017); Met Breuer, New York (2018); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2019); Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris (2021); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (2023); Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (2024); Stedelijk Museum and Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (2025); Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (2025); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2025); Saint Louis Art Museum (2025); and Palazzo Reale, Milan (2026).

Les Innombrables: Two White Doors. Found public art installation. 35 White Street, Tribeca, New York City, September 9, 2026.

On White Street, during the openings of the fall 2026 gallery season, the Swiss collective Les Innombrables seizes a plywood enclosure already occupying the curb and redesignates it, without alteration of its contractual status as a temporary construction shed, as a sculptural intervention. The gesture is continuous with a practice the collective has described, since its founding in Heidiland in 1991, as the seizure of randomly found realities: the work does not precede the site, nor does the site wait to be completed by the work. What is already there—the temporary house of a renovation, two white domestic doors set into a skin of CDX plywood, its padlock, its orange cones and striped barricade tape, its rented light tower—is intensified until the distinction between infrastructure and exhibition collapses.

The two doors offer the iconography of entrance while refusing entry. In the vocabulary of the threshold that runs from Duchamp’s door in 11 rue Larrey to the institutional vestibule, this door is neither open nor closed in any operative sense; it is a citation of passage installed where passage has been administratively suspended.

Illumination is supplied by a battery of floodlights mounted on a Wacker Neuson tower, itself branded Sunbelt Rentals, parked at the perimeter. The lights do what museum lighting does to a vitrine: they isolate, they raise the value of the surface, they produce a night in which the plywood grain reads as facture. Yet the source remains legibly rented, metered, and temporary, a logistics of visibility borrowed from night work rather than from the gallery. Under that glare the shed becomes both barrier and beacon, occupying the circulatory logic of Tribeca at the hour when collectors move between openings. The cones and tape that cordon it off are not an additional installation; they are the municipal grammar by which the city already distinguishes authorized obstruction from trespass. To walk around them is to perform the work’s only available choreography.

Set against the cast-iron and brick façades, the fire escapes, and the red graffiti still legible on the neighboring pier, the shed refuses the romance of the ruin and the romance of the new. It is neither monument nor model. It is the interval in which a building is not yet, or no longer, habitable—an interval the fall season, with its synchronized vernissages, customarily overlooks. By naming that interval, and by doing nothing else, Les Innombrables returns the street to the condition of a found performance: an occupation that was already underway, now briefly legible as such, before the lights are switched off and the door remains locked.

Just kidding. It’s just a hut with two white doors.

(Review by art critic Gregory Groker)

.

Out now: VernissageTV Magazine No. 64, October 2026. In this issue: Bill Miller, Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen, Jean-Pierre Nadau, Fondation Beyeler Expansion (Peter Zumthor), Brad Kahlhamer.

Order print copy via Peecho.

Welcome to Offscreen, the fifth edition of this distinctive Paris Art Week event, held at the historic Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière from 20 to 25 October 2026.

Founded by Julien Frydman, Offscreen focuses on still and moving images—photography, film, video, and installations—presented by around 29 artists from international galleries. The setting is a 17th-century chapel, where works engage with the architecture, vaults, and history of the space.

This year’s guest of honour is Ana Mendieta. Six of her films, presented with Marian Goodman Gallery and her estate, occupy the central rotunda, complementing her concurrent Tate Modern retrospective. Her earth-body works and siluetas set a contemplative tone.

Other presentations include Steina Vasulka’s multi-monitor sculpture, photographic works by Boris Mikhailov and Ken Ohara, and site-specific installations by artists such as Andrea Geyer and Ibrahim Mahama. In the Magasins, the Acquisitions and Discoveries programme features loans from the Pinault Collection and the Whitney Museum.

The result is a tightly curated salon rather than a conventional fair, emphasizing experimental image practices within a monumental historic interior.

Offscreen Paris 2026. Paris (France), October 24, 2026.

00:00 – Intro 00:25 – Giovanni Ozzola | Galleria Continua & dialogue 00:43 – Valentina Furian | UNA 01:08 – Sarah Brahim | Albion Jeune 02:02 – Marisa González | Galería Isabel Hurley 02:41 – Petra Feriancová | Elizabeth Xi Bauer 02:57 – Aglaia Konrad | Nadja Vilenne 03:21 – Lívia Melzi | Salon /H 03:57 – Steven Pippin | Galleria Enrico Astuni 04:34 – Moris | NF/Nieves Fernández & Arróniz 05:04 – Rinus Van de Velde | Galerie Max Hetzler 05:46 – Boris Mikhaïlov | Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve 06:03 – Barbara Bloom | Galerie Gisela Capitain & Capitain Petzel 06:52 – Jason Isolini | Picture Theory 07:57 – Pedro A.H. Paixão | Irène Laub Gallery 08:19 – Antony Cairns | Cob Gallery 09:17 – Shiraz Bayjoo | Copperfield 09:41 – Adel Abidin | NIKA Project Space 10:13 – Ken Ohara | La Patinoire Royale Bach 10:28 – Ana Mendieta | Marian Goodman Gallery 10:52 – Waldemar Cordeiro | The Mayor Gallery 11:15 – Suzy Lake | Bradley Ertaskiran 11:35 – Steina Vasulka | BERG Contemporary 11:56 – Ibrahim Mahama | APALAZZOGALLERY 12:20 – Thomas Paquet | Bigaignon 12:43 – Daria Koltsova | SUPRAINFINIT 13:31 – Esther Mathis | Livie Gallery 14:11 – Josef Achrer | Galerie Bene Taschen 14:31 – Laurent Millet | Binome 15:08 – Andrea Geyer | Zander Galerie

This video presents selected highlights from the 12th edition of Paris Internationale, held from 20 to 24 October 2026 (with a preview on 19 October) at 187–189 Quai de Valmy in the Canal Saint-Martin district of Paris.

The fair occupies a 3,500 m² disused building, organised by the architectural practice Christ & Gantenbein across a street-facing tower and courtyard structure with multiple courtyards. Roughly 56 galleries and non-profit spaces from 19 countries take part, including 15 first-time participants. Emerging and established galleries are presented together rather than in separate sectors.

Paris Internationale 2026. Paris, October 21, 2024.