For its second year in the newly renovated Grand Palais, Art Paris is increasing its commitment to young galleries and emerging artists thanks to Promises curated by independent exhibition curator Marc Donnadieu. In 2026, this sector located on the balconies overlooking the nave will play host to 27 galleries established less than ten years ago, 12 of which are first-time exhibitors. 56% are from France and the remaining 44% are foreign galleries that hail from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Italy, Luxembourg, Morocco, Singapore and the USA. Participating galleries may present up to three emerging artists. This section is supported by the fair, allowing for reduce exhibitor fees, with a rate of € 10,000 (excluding VAT) for a 20 m² booth.

22,48 m² (Romainville) has opted for a solo show by Nicolas Boulard, a French artist who mixes art, food and magic rituals, redefining in so doing the vocabulary of art by shifting the conventions of representation towards the field of fermentation. As he explores the limits between artworks and utilitarian objects, between traditional expertise and experimental gestures, bread and cheese become a means to convey his thoughts on norms and non-conformism and the way in which living matter can destabilise established order, produce meaning and open out onto new poetic spaces. His work has nothing to do with cookery: it is a new way of envisaging the world.

For its first participation at Art Paris, AA Gallery (Casablanca) has chosen to present a solo show by Moroccan artist Yasmine Hadni, whose entire body of work simultaneously adopts two different positions. The first - based as it is on one's relationship with oneself - is intimate and introspective, whereas the second takes the more social and political standpoint of one's relationship with others. Each painting is therefore grounded in the unique way in which Hadni has defined and constructed her own identity around her family and the wider framework of the Moroccan middle classes. It is from the mingling of these two approaches that she creates (with exceptional delicacy and subtlety) "another reality", one that is in harmony with both her inner truth and the realities of the outside world.

First-time exhibitor Alain Hélou (Brest) has chosen to combine the language of art with the language of life itself. Dmitry Bulnygin revisits the herbarium, addressing the inherent fragility of flowers and plants with a particularly sophisticated and poetic approach. Conversely, Mylinh Nguyen cleverly reconfigures twigs and seeds in all their raw simplicity into new compositions, whose geometry competes with the movement of the landscape itself. For Ilann Vogt, it is language itself that is ceaselessly intertwined as he weaves together strips of sentences that float here and there on the movements of air raised by the uncertainty of words themselves.

• Ilann Vogt
• La montagne magique, Thomas Mann, 2019
• Galerie Alain Hélou

Bao (Paris) specialises in the Southeast Asian art scene and, for its first participation at Art Paris, the gallery is focussing on the theme of reparation as a meditative process. In the work of Trương Công Tùng, the slow sanding of lacquer is based on a principle of erasure that paradoxically reveals the hidden meaning and memorial sense of objects. The starting point for Nguyễn Duy Mạnh is Vietnamese pottery from the 14^th to the 19^th centuries, which he deliberately cuts into before repairing the wounds he has inflicted with quasi-organic stitches. Finally, Lêna Bùi employs rubbings of tree stumps superposed with silk paintings and watercolours to bring the felled, centuries-old trees of Ho Chi Minh City back to life.

Anne-Laure Buffard (Paris) invites visitors, in a constant back and forth between fragility and resilience, to rethink how things circulate between the surface to the depths. In her Mediterranean sea salt and ash encrusted prints, Ilanit Illouz employs subtle processes of sedimentation to reveal the mineral memories of landscapes. Part image, part sculpture, the ceramics of Yoshimi Futamura contribute to this reflection on time, geology and natural forces. Finally, the exchange gains further depth thanks to the paintings of Gregory Hodge who, starting from digitally collaged images, creates complex surfaces with a deliberate hand-made quality that are reminiscent of the warp and weft of tapestry.

Specialising in the contemporary African art scene and that of its diaspora, The Bridge Gallery (Paris) has opted this year to showcase how intense colour can be equated with the flow of life itself. Bulumko Mbete finds inspiration in the traditions of Southern Africa to transform textiles into a repository of memory, weaving, in so doing, connections between individual experience and collective stories. The photographs taken by Sarfo Emmanuel Annor focus on contemporary African youth, conveying their uniquely individual stories by means of particularly intense colours. Finally Noah Beyene, in whose person Swedish and Ethiopian cultures combine, expresses the fractured identities of his generation in exceptionally delicate paintings.

• Noah Beyene
• Midnight Sun, 2024
• The Bridge Gallery

C+N Gallery Canepaneri (Genoa, Milan) establishes an exhilarating dialogue between the ceramics of British artist Holly Stevenson and the paintings of Chinese artist Deng Shiqing. In the works on show, Stevenson revisits fairy tales, taking an ironic, burlesque look at their relationship with the idea of femininity, whereas Shiqing employs AI and the practices of social media to reappropriate historical masterpieces. To our delight they challenge, each in their own way, established notions of past and present, of tradition and contemporary life, of knowledge and spontaneity.

First-time exhibitor Cassandra Bird Gallery (Sydney, Paris), a rising star on the Australian scene with a gallery space in Paris, sets out to establish an intergenerational and intercultural meeting of the ways between long-established Australian artist Janet Laurence and Juanita McLauchlan, an indigenous artist in mid-career. Together, they have produced a unique new landscape where the sovereignty of nature and ancestral heritage can be honoured, thereby fostering a new vision for the future. Environmental interdependence is at the heart of the immersive installations of Laurence, whereas the voices of First Nations peoples and their ancestral tales run though the textile sculptures of McLauchlan.

• Juanita McLauchlan
• guuma-li / gather series, 2024
• Cassandra Bird Gallery

Chiguer art contemporain (Montreal, Quebec) is organising a duo show with two artists who, although they are from completely different horizons, share similar practices based on the reappropriation of ancestral myths and symbols. Inspired by Italian istoriato ware and other Renaissance ceramics decorated with narrative scenes, Canadian artist Lindsay Montgomery creates unique new stories that reveal the legacy of colonialism and how it has left its mark on her native Ontario. In parallel, Moroccan artist Abdelmalik Berhiss sources his inspiration in amazigh craftsmanship, rock art in the Atlas Mountains and Islamic architecture. His pictorial experimentations are maze-like visions that are an invitation to embark on a spiritual journey to discover the origin of the world.

Cuturi Gallery (Singapore, London, Paris) is showcasing the work of Singaporean sculptor Mahalakshmi Kannappan, in whose work the many shades of black are used to portray the sensitive spectrum of experiences and emotions by means of a precise and delicate play of textures. For Kannappan, the darkest blacks evoke the density and weight of time, whereas lighter shades express transition and movement. This subtle approach allows her sculptural language to uniquely capture both immobility and flow, the permanent and the ephemeral.

As a staunch defender of figurative painting, Valérie Delaunay (Paris) is presenting three artists: Thibaut Huchard, Dayane Obadia, and Sergio Morabito. Above and beyond their formal differences, they are brought together by a shared desire to revisit ancestral narrative forms and thereby shed light on the present day. The epic stories of the Crusades in the work of Huchard, Obadia's explorations of fantastic mythologies and the metaphysical speculations of Morabito become a means to reflect upon social and political struggles, identity conflict and modern-day mental anxiety.

• Sergio Morabito
• Cerro de la Matanza, 2024
• Galerie Valerie Delaunay

EDJI Gallery (Brussels) has opted to pay tribute to the legendary Parisian brasserie with an exhibit featuring work by painter and ceramic artist Philippine d’Otreppe. The entire stand therefore takes the form of a single immersive installation that perfectly recreates the joyous atmosphere of a gargantuan dinner, which is both immediately recognisable and yet somehow surprising. In the middle, a large table is haphazardly covered with half-eaten dishes, abandoned plates and half-empty glasses. All around, the walls come to life with canvases that seem to convey fragments of stories and memories. The sheer virtuosity and force of the artist’s work resides in this stupefying toing and froing between dream and reality, between truth and illusion.

Faithful to its dual French and Japanese identity, Écho 119 (Paris) explores new artistic trends that convey a commitment to current environmental, geopolitical and social issues. For 2026, the gallery has decided to bring together three of its artists - Aurore de la Morinerie, Manon Lanjouère and Laure Winants - around the theme of the ocean floor. Experimental mediums and sculptures are juxtaposed with works on paper and photographs to reveal our relationship with the world of the abyss, a world that is paradoxically so near and yet so far and whose existence and unparalleled riches are a continual subject of discussion for the political and economic powers that be.

Dystopia, the project presented by Galerie Idéale (Paris) at Art Paris 2026, asks three artists to turn their eye to a future world in which worry and wonderment are caught in a struggle for our attention. Across an ensemble of dense and teeming miniatures, Léa Bouton focusses on unknown lands where bizarre, half-human and half-animal, part-organic and part-mechanical creatures roam. The sculptures and assemblages of Marc Ming Chan take the form of neo-suprematist artefacts that evoke equally strange and fascinating imaginary worlds. Finally, the recent paintings of Stéphane Pencréac’h tackle major contemporary political and social upheavals in a more direct fashion.

• Marc Ming Chan
• I LASH 5, 2020
• Galerie Idéale

First time exhibitor Iragui Gallery (Romainville) forges fertile dialogues between different stories, sensibilities and international and intergenerational cultures. The works of Milanese painter Linda Carrara, multidisciplinary Portuguese artist Carlos Noronha Feio and internationally renowned Russian visual artist Olga Chernysheva all explore those in-between spaces where images are set free from the obligation to represent, while conserving the intention to summon up or suggest fragmented memories. In other words: to produce dreamed realities capable of repairing the world and curing humankind.

For its first participation at Art Paris, Grège Galerie (Brussels) is presenting a duo show featuring Spanish artist Chidy Wayne and French artist Juliette Lemontey. Together, they address the body and the tensions that exist between presence and absence, between rooted stability and flight, between permanence and the fact of just passing through. In the work of Wayne, the human figure takes on monumental proportions. It is solid and run through with inner intensity. Although the rest of the body has been simplified to an undefinable silhouette, each figure's meticulously modelled face embodies existence and identity. Conversely, in the work of Lemontey, everything is simply outlined in a rejection of the precision of detail, leaving the viewer with a fleeting impression of fragile, ephemeral memories.

• Chidy Wayne
• Pugnator , 2023
• Grège Gallery

Porte B (Paris) invites visitors to experience light and colour as materials and to perceive time and space differently. Photographs combine with painted glass sheets in the work of Marguerite Bornhauser to convey the different states of territory, while providing a veritable sensory experience between appearance and dissolution. In resonance with these creations, Marion Flament presents works from her series “Combler le jour” and “Tout a la même couleur”, in addition to selected works from “Les Témoins”, which were produced in collaboration with Marguerite Bornhauser. Light – shadows, reflections and traces – provides clues that reveal how landscapes are transformed.

Camille Pouyfaucon (Paris) is showcasing a new generation of artists who, while looking to the classical conventions of figurative painting, have brought a resolutely contemporary dimension to the genre. Eugénie Didier, Léa Toutain and Gongmo Zhou belong to a generation that observes daily life with a fresh and yet just as sharp eye, expressing a fascination for surfaces and exploring ways to see beyond what seems familiar and brought together by a shared desire to make us truly aware of our everyday surroundings. Their works suggest that reality cannot be captured so easily and that we should always question what is visible, whether that is what we see or only what we think we see, not forgetting all that escapes our eye.

Rémy Pommeret. Inspired by the dioramas of natural history museums, they form a unique spatial archipelago that juxtaposes formal equilibrium and the spontaneity of modelling, mineral opacity and a near organic translucency. By subtly preserving the traces of his slow and introspective creative process (in which the kiln, the clay and the artist's gesture all have an equal role to play), his animal ceramics play with ornamentation to develop a new approach to the Anthropocene.

• Rémy Pommeret
• Actia Luna, 2024
• Galerie La peau de l'ours

Prima (Paris) is presenting a journey through the material, psychological and cultural aspects of domesticity. The interior is no longer a simple decorative backdrop, but a place of tension and narrative. In the work of Gaspard Girard d’Albissin, fragments of everyday life are extracted from anonymous pictures or the constant flow of images that surround us and recomposed into paintings in which elements that seem ordinary give rise to an impression of strangeness. Bryce Delplanque ironically revisits the English Chippendale furniture style, while employing an aesthetic borrowed from the Chippendales stripteasers, reminding us that private life and spectacle are not so far apart. Finally, Héloïse Rival experiments with wall ceramics by means of a delicate and skilful interweaving of motifs and figures.

First-time exhibitor Pauline Renard (Lille) was only founded in 2025. Its stand will be entirely given over to "Les Égarées", a recent series by Lara Bloy. Bloy belongs to a new generation of painters who, while drawing on the classical conventions of representation, bring a resolutely contemporary dimension to figurative art. In each of her paintings, she explores the human condition and the inner character of gestures and domestic intimacy, placing them at the heart of quasi-metaphysical spaces whose detailed precision immerses us in a state of introspection.

• Lara Bloy
• Egarée 41, 2024
• Galerie Pauline Renard

New to Art Paris this year, Reuter Bausch Art Gallery (Luxembourg) has chosen to focus on the work of Luxembourgian artist Pit Riewer. Exploring the way in which sensory experience, memory and affect can be conveyed through the medium of painting, he deconstructs and reconstructs images seen as visual, perceptual and emotional events rather than representations. He recently began working with low-resolution thermal images, examining their every detail in the hope of finding a human presence that has almost entirely faded away. Whether they are a product of darkness or heat, his paintings question less what we see than what we feel when our vision fails us.

Newly installed in the French Basque Country, Sailly (Biarritz) presents a conversation between three young artists who are redefining the memory of materials and cultural identity. Javier Carro Temboury reuses found objects in order to develop combinatorial systems in which methodology fashions the finished work. Marion Artense Gély employs the techniques of glazing and sfumato to experiment with the artifice of appearance and thereby expose the strata of forgotten memories. And finally, Garance Matton grounds her practice in Quattrocento painting, but rather than choosing between different forms or figures, she explores what happens as they come up against each other or attempt to merge.

Michèle Schoonjans Gallery (Brussels) highlights how art transforms the way we perceive the world, combining matter and memory to reveal all that remains invisible in our surroundings. Amélie Scotta juxtaposes painted surfaces and drawn motifs to better signify the dynamics of construction and the mutation of our habitats. Michiko Van de Velde transforms her observations of fleeting luminous phenomena into veritable inner landscapes. And finally, Jean-Baptiste Brueder explores urban memory in sculpture paintings made up of architectural fragments and building materials that bear witness to the impermanence of constructions.

• Michiko Van de Velde
• Komorebi Japanese Maple tree 木漏 日-紅葉, 2025
• Michèle Schoonjans Gallery

Committed to promoting the Brazilian scene in France, Salon H (Paris) decided to focus on Ian Salamente, a young artist from Cabo Frio, a city shaped by the salt industry. His canvases characterised by the use of earthy colours transform the ordinary into allegory: a broken trophy becomes a sign of resilience; the jersey of an amateur sports team signifies a sense of belonging. Salt is a fundamental and recurrent element: it acts as a link, a trace and a memory that weave together colonial, working-class and individual stories. In his paintings, friends, neighbours and anonymous figures who all share the same worries and dreams, embody a combative and inventive youth for whom everyday life on the margins becomes a political symbol.

Spaceless Gallery (Paris, New York) presents three artists who address the theme of nature as a language, which is reframed by craft and/or technology. The AI-generated bronze branches and new Aubusson tapestries of Aurèce Vettier transpose organic forms into hybrid vocabularies. In "Rose" and "Moon", two series by Quentin Derouet, petals and charcoal are transformed into signs of passage and memory. And finally, finding inspiration in wabi-sabi and kintsukuroi, Zhu Ohmu rediscovers the deep meaning of beauty as expressed in imperfection and repair. Folding and stacking the clay, he develops a unique language made up of intense and profound gestures.

For its first participation at Art Paris, Studio23 (Ghent) is bringing together two Belgian artists who both explore the fragile connections between identity and landscape. Shifting between earthly gravity and spiritual detachment, the works of Johan Tahon works open up a new space, a place where visitors can experience the unfinished and the incomplete and, in so doing, perhaps find themselves. In parallel, Joren Van Acker turns his gaze towards the world of the oceans, which becomes a mental and symbolic horizon. His deep black charcoal drawings consider the infinite ocean as a place of both orientation and loss, of control and abandon.