Paris galleries aren’t just all blue-chip Marais affairs with velvet ropes and collector price tags. Some of the most interesting spaces in the city exist off the main drag… Typically places where living artists are asking questions through their work, where curators are taking risks, and where you are invited into the dialogue without feeling like you’re the misnomer. Here’s where to find them.
1. PAL Project
39 rue de Grenelle, 75007 Paris
To understand PAL Project, you have to understand Dina Vierny and the mold-breaking spirit of the Parisian tradition. So let’s consider Dina Vierny, the monumental sculptor Aristide Maillol’s last model, who became the keeper of his legacy and far more besides. Her lounging sculptures still recline in the Tuileries gardens as a kind of open-air prelude. In 1947, she opened an art gallery in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In 1995, she established the Musée Maillol, realizing their shared dream of a museum that breathed the same air as the city. She understood that art belongs outside as much as in.
Her successors, Pierre Lorquin and Alexander Lorquin, continue to maintain that legacy and have pushed further. They founded PAL Project in 2020, giving young curators carte blanche to work with a new generation of artists.
2. Ruttkowski;68
8 rue Charlot, 75003 Paris
Founded in Cologne in 2010 by Nils Müller and named after Sven Ruttkowski – a DJ and nightlife impresario – Ruttkowski;68 has always positioned itself as approachable, sociable, decidedly not elitist. It’s a friendly gallery in the 3rd that is always willing to take the time to answer your questions.
Now with locations in Düsseldorf, Bochum, and New York, their Paris space opened in 2018 in the Marais and carries the same ethos. The gallery concentrates on a broad range of contemporary practices with an unranked approach across a wide range of arenas. This is what it calls “an ever-evolving link between the high and the low.” The gallery also regularly hosts many independent curators, including their Mixed Pickles program, a curatorial series that underscores its commitment to interdisciplinary work and artist visibility.
3. Galleria Continua
87 rue du Temple, 75003 Paris
From the outside, the Marais location of Galleria Continua might look like a worse-for-wear café. It’s anything but a white cube, as the wall holds traces of its former lives. The gallery has strong ties to the Venice Biennale and other major institutions, and its artists consistently challenge norms in ways that matter. This goes back to their roots of moving off the regular path. Galleria Continua was founded in 1990 by three Italian friends – Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi, and Maurizio Rigillo – who made their name by setting up shop in a former cinema in San Gimignano, Tuscany, far from any urban art center. The move was considered insane at the time. But now, with over eight locations, it’s certainly worked.
In 2007, they brought that same spirit to France, opening a second location at 46 rue de la Ferté Gaucher, 77169 Boissy-le-Châtel, taking over a 10,000m² paper mill dating back to the 1820s. The industrial architecture became the backdrop for monumental works by Anish Kapoor, Kader Attia, Daniel Buren, and Mona Hatoum. In 2010, they acquired the adjacent 18th-century Sainte-Marie paper mill, adding another 30,000m² and two spectacular 1,500m² exhibition halls.
4. sans titre
13 rue Michel Le Comte, 75003 Paris
For its first three years (2016-2019), sans titre‘s location was something you heard whispered about in its corners and was forever changing. Founded by curator Marie Madec, it operated nomadically with private apartments, industrial spaces, parking lots, a shipyard, hotel rooms, and restaurants.
In 2020, sans titre settled into a permanent address: a former Restoration-era bar at 13 rue Michel Le Comte, steps from Galleria Continua, its facade registered as a Historic Monument. But nomadism remains in its DNA. The gallery still hosts visiting international galleries and curators, and Madec continues to stage exhibitions in atypical ways.
Sans titre works with international artists early in their careers, producing fanzines and editions alongside each show. The program is multidisciplinary, and the ethos is democratic. If you want to know what the next generation is thinking, this is one location to look.
5. 229Lab
229 rue Saint-Honoré, 75001 Paris
229Lab on rue Saint-Honoré is run by artist couple Marie Polo and Édouard Burgeat, with their beloved Kiba-san holding down operations. Straddling performance, fashion, and art, 229Lab’s kaleidoscopic programming has also included artists like Chinese performance artist Han Bing and German conceptual artist Protey Temen. This laboratory of experimentation, run by artists for artists, opened in 2023, and it is continuing to reinvent itself and maintain a strong wheelhouse of activities. It is worth joining their mailing list or, even better yet, their members’ club to stay in the loop.
6. AU Passage
59 rue Sainte-Anne, 75002 Paris
Just ten minutes’ walk away is AU Passage, a jumble of vitrines that feels more like a cabinet of curiosities than a conventional gallery. The current show, DUOS, runs until March 7, with works available through the art supplies store @lavrutparis.1922. Part of the program is Gorgeous like Ancient Columns, curated by Dani Issler, who has also exhibited works by Daniela Baldelli, founder of Rinomina, a perfectly scant and consistently sharp gallery just up from the Seine.
7. Goswell Road
22 rue de l’Échiquier, 75010 Paris
Goswell Road is the project of Franco-British artist duo Coralie Ruiz and Anthony Stephinson, who started the space in 2016 in their studio off rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. The name comes from the street they lived on in London before relocating to Paris, “God’s Well,” from the pagan practice of well-worship, built over the subterranean New River. Every exhibition at this edgy gallery comes with two things: a book and a curated bouquet of flowers by Ruiz Stephinson.
Goswell Road focuses on underrepresented artists, those whose engaged or transgressive work needs reevaluation. The programming leans toward the underground, the experimental, the politically charged. It’s a space built on belief rather than sales projections. In November 2026, Goswell Road celebrates its tenth anniversary.
8. Imane Farès
41 rue Mazarine, 75006 Paris
Imane Farès opened her eponymous gallery in 2010 with a specific mission: to promote contemporary artists from the African continent and the Middle East, reflecting her own Lebanese and Senegalese heritage. Over the past fifteen years, that focus has expanded globally, but the gallery’s commitment to artists whose work addresses society, politics, history, and identity has remained absolute. Her gallery doesn’t just show work, it co-produces exhibitions with major institutions: Palazzo Pitti, Vienna Secession, Institut Giacometti, Beaux-Arts de Paris, WIELS, Frac Bretagne. Artists represented by the gallery – like Sinzo Aanza, Basma al-Sharif, Sammy Baloji, Minia Biabiany, Ali Cherri, Emeka Ogboh, Younès Rahmoun, James Webb – have works in the collections of MoMA, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim, Museo Reina Sofía, and MAXXI. This is a gallery operating at the intersection of commercial viability and intellectual rigour, and consistently produces shows to ponder.
Final Words
Paris sustains a rare ecosystem, from grand institutions commissioning permanent works to studio communities where the work actually gets made to nimble independent spaces where it first gets shown. It has also demonstrated, with a new influx of artists moving in, that it is still a place where real dialogue can happen. Artnet noted as far back as 2021 that the city was buzzing, drawing international galleries with real-estate opportunity and genuine creative renewal. What they were picking up on was this: a city where the infrastructure runs deeper than the 200-plus galleries of the Marais. The Paris Gallery Map gives you the overview. Getting off the main drag gives you the rest.
Want to experience Paris’s living art scene with an insider? Paris Art Walks offers artist-led tours of galleries, studios, and exhibitions – the Paris that doesn’t make it onto the tourist map.
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