Australian Galleries Make Their Mark at Art Paris 2026

The annual Paris fair has long served as a barometer for how international audiences receive work from outside the European mainstream, and this year’s edition offered a compelling case study in the range and ambition of what Australian commercial galleries are now willing to put before a sophisticated Parisian crowd.

Chalk Horse, the Darlinghurst-based gallery known for championing painters who operate at the intersection of figuration and cultural identity, occupied Booth H3 with a group presentation that drew on five artists whose practices share little surface resemblance but feel, together, like a coherent argument about what Australian painting is doing right now.

Clara Adolphs and Jasper Knight brought the booth’s most immediately seductive works — Adolphs’ hazy, affect-laden figurative canvases in particular read beautifully in a fair context, where atmosphere must do considerable work quickly. Jason Phu, whose deadpan ink-based practice fuses Chinese literary tradition with an irreverent contemporary sensibility, offered welcome tonal contrast: dry, witty, and deceptively light. First Nations artists Adrian Jangala Robertson and Billy Benn grounded the booth in something older and more anchored — Robertson’s work drawing on Warlpiri Dreaming and Benn’s practice carrying the visual language of the Western Desert into dialogue with the other painters around him. The pairing resisted tokenism; rather, the booth felt genuinely considered, the range of voices creating productive friction rather than false coherence.

Elsewhere at the fair, Cassandra Bird (Booth I13) staged an intergenerational duo presentation bringing together Janet Laurence and Juanita McLauchlan — a pairing that positioned ecological consciousness alongside First Nations knowledge systems with striking coherence. Laurence, one of the country’s most internationally recognised ecological artists, brought her characteristic materially rich installations meditating on environmental fragility and regeneration. McLauchlan, a First Nations artist whose practice draws from cultural knowledge systems, lived experience, and an intimate relationship to Country, contributed sculpture, found materials, and printmaking rooted in ancestral presence and healing. The presentation held space for parallel ways of seeing and knowing without collapsing the distance between them — a genuinely considered curatorial act. Both artists were named finalists for the Her Art Prize 2026, awarded through a partnership between Art Paris, Marie Claire and Maison Boucheron in recognition of women artists whose work has shifted lines. McLauchlan was additionally selected by guest curator Alexia Fabre — executive director of the Centre Pompidou Francilien — to feature in Reparation, a themed section of the fair bringing together twenty international artists through the lens of care, repair, and cultural memory.

Separately, Cassandra Bird Paris opened a solo exhibition of Laurence’s work, Once Were Forests, supported by Australian fashion house Zimmermann. Working with ice, forest materials, reflective surfaces, and soundscapes drawn from Australian birdsong, the exhibition extended well beyond the typical fair booth format into something closer to an environmental installation.

Taken together, the presentations suggested something of the breadth of what Australian galleries are now exporting with confidence: on one hand, a lively, contested conversation about painting and identity; on the other, a mature ecological practice that asks genuinely urgent questions without ever becoming didactic. Paris, it turns out, is listening.

Art Paris ran 9–12 April 2026 at the Grand Palais, Paris.

Above: Janet Laurence, Climate Puzzle, 2026. Chromogenic on shinkolite, 100 x 200cm. Courtesy: Cassandra Bird Gallery, Paris.