Paris Extra Muros: A Guide to Five Centres d'Art Worth the Train Ride
Beyond central Paris, a network of noncollecting institutions is presenting some of the region's most experimental exhibitions, often with more risk than major museums can absorb.
Paris's strongest institutional season is currently unfolding outside the postcard center. Across Île-de-France, centres d'art are staging exhibitions that combine research, performance, installation, and public programming with a level of agility that larger museums often cannot match.
Start in Houilles at La Graineterie, where Clément Raveu's group show ça parle en douce gathers Parisa Babaei, Rafael Moreno, Hatice Pinarbaşi, and Manoela Prates around slippages between spoken and visual language. Pinarbaşi's textile-rich floor-level installation rewards slow looking, while Moreno's peephole construction turns spectatorship into a problem of access and control.
In Ivry-sur-Seine, Le Crédac's Andiamo pairs designer Pierre Charpin and painter Nathalie Du Pasquier. The surprise is how quickly the pairing makes sense: recurring shapes, serial color families, and still-life logic pass fluently between object and painting. Plan at least an hour, the show's sequence is deliberately didactic-light.
If you only visit blue-chip galleries and central museums, you miss where institutional experimentation is actually happening in Île-de-France.
Further south, CAC Brétigny, temporarily off-site during renovation, presents Lettres du quotidien with Mona Varichon and Malak El Zanaty Varichon. The project folds family correspondence, workshop ephemera, political recordings, and image archives into a dense argument about amateur and professional art worlds, without romanticizing either.
Back in Paris, Bétonsalon is hosting Jean-Alain Corre's Hibou TV Show, a sprawling satirical set activated by talks, readings, and live-streamed sessions. It channels the legacy of artist-led public access television while keeping one foot in current platform culture.
Practical route: group your visits by RER lines, check each venue's weekend hours in advance, and prioritize public programs where possible, these institutions are built as much around discussion formats as around static display.