DAVID ZWIRNER PARIS MARKS 40 YEARS AT ONE ADDRESS

Forty years since a door opened on rue Vieille du Temple, David Zwirner's Paris gallery marks the anniversary tonight with thirty two artists in one building. Au 108 rue Vieille du Temple: A Shared Legacy with Galerie Yvon Lambert opens September 8 and runs through October 10, 2026, at the Le Marais address where Yvon Lambert built one of the first serious platforms for postwar American art in France.

September 20, 1986. The Address Opens Once.

Yvon Lambert inaugurated his glass roofed gallery at 108 rue Vieille du Temple on September 20, 1986, after founding his original Paris gallery two decades earlier in 1966. He used the new space to keep showing the American conceptualists, minimalists, and land artists he had already staked his reputation on: Carl Andre, Lawrence Weiner, Sol LeWitt, On Kawara, and Barbara Kruger all had strong ties to the gallery there.

That single address carried the program for twenty eight years. Lambert closed the gallery on December 31, 2014, and the space sat without a tenant of that stature until David Zwirner moved in during 2019, five years later. The current show lands eleven days before the forty year mark of Lambert's opening night, close enough that the timing reads as deliberate, not coincidental.

Basquiat Made New Work for This Address in 1988

Jean Michel Basquiat's 1988 show at Yvon Lambert was his first solo exhibition in France built from work made specifically for the space, not a survey pulled from existing inventory. He designed the exhibition poster himself, titled Supercomb, and the show opened the same year he died at 27.

That history gives the current exhibition its sharpest edge. Basquiat is one of thirty two artists in Au 108 rue Vieille du Temple, alongside Christian Boltanski, Nan Goldin, and Cy Twombly, all names who built part of their European reputation inside that room decades before David Zwirner signed a lease and later gave the address to Michaël Borremans' Paris solo this past June.

Anselm Kiefer Spans Both Eras

Anselm Kiefer is one of the few artists in the show whose relationship with the address predates Zwirner entirely. Lambert exhibited Kiefer at 108 rue Vieille du Temple starting in the late 1980s, and the current show hangs Palmsonntag, a 2006 work, as its Kiefer entry, a two decade jump inside one artist's own history with the building.

Robert Ryman's Untitled, dated to around 1963, sits at the other end of the timeline, predating the gallery's move to this address by more than two decades and arriving here only because the current show is explicitly building a bridge across four decades instead of staying inside Lambert's own program years. Dan Flavin and Agnes Martin round out the minimalist and light based work in the mix, both artists whose American reputations Lambert helped translate for a European audience the first time around.

Putting a 1963 Ryman canvas next to a 2006 Kiefer inside a building that did not exist as a gallery until 1986 is a curatorial choice with a point to make: the artists came first, and the address only had to be old enough to hold them all in one room at once.

Three Zwirner Paris Shows, One Calendar Year

This is the third David Zwirner Paris exhibition of 2026 built around a specific historical claim instead of a routine solo hang. Rose Wylie's first French solo ran there in March alongside a simultaneous Royal Academy survey in London, and Borremans followed in June.

Neither of those shows carried the weight of an anniversary tied to the building itself. Au 108 rue Vieille du Temple is the first 2026 program at the address to argue that the room, not the artist, is the subject, and it does so by hanging thirty two names instead of one.

Thirty Two Names, One Night in Le Marais

Thirty two artists across five decades is a heavier list than most gallery group shows attempt, and the range signals a curatorial argument instead of a retrospective clip show. Richard Serra and Sol LeWitt represent the sculptural and conceptual backbone Lambert built his early reputation on, while Jordan Wolfson and David Shrigley extend that lineage into work made well after Lambert had already left the address.

Basquiat's own crossover into music, as one half of the noise rock band Gray before his painting career took off, is the kind of detail that makes this show read as culture rather than inventory. A gallery does not choose thirty two names by accident, and pairing Basquiat's 1988 Supercomb poster with Ryman's 1963 canvas in those rooms argues that Le Marais has been staging one long conversation between American and European art since before most of the current program's collectors were born. The bet is that the address still carries more authority than any single artist on the checklist, and forty years in, nobody at 108 rue Vieille du Temple has had to prove that wrong yet.