Post-Fair Brings Its Dealer-Run Model to Paris During Art Basel Week
A Los Angeles fair built on restraint rather than spectacle is crossing the Atlantic. Post-Fair, the curatorially minded event founded by Chris Sharp, will hold its first international edition in Paris from October 19 to 25, 2026, during Art Basel Paris week.
The fair will occupy two buildings in the Marais, at 74 Rue du Temple and 79 Rue du Temple, with around 34 galleries expected to participate by invitation only. As in Los Angeles, exhibitors will present solo or two-person stands, a format Sharp says allows for more focused programming and greater curatorial risk.
Sharp, who also runs a Los Angeles gallery, sees Paris as a natural next step. He lived in the city for a decade, working as a writer and curator, and previously organized Place des Vosges, a small fair overlooking the square of the same name. He also points to Paris’s growing importance in the European art market, especially after Brexit, as well as the city’s appeal to American and Asian collectors.
Participation will cost exhibitors $6,000, a figure Sharp contrasts with the higher fees and logistical burdens of major commercial fairs. Admission for visitors will be free with advance registration. The fair’s invitation-only roster is expected to include galleries from Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Paris, and the UK.
Post-Fair’s Los Angeles edition has been staged in the former Santa Monica Post Office, a 1938 Art Deco landmark built with New Deal funding. Rather than conventional white booths, the fair uses an open-plan layout that gives the event the feel of a contemporary art museum. Sharp says the Paris edition will continue that approach in two architecturally distinct buildings facing one another across Rue du Temple.
His own gallery will present a solo stand devoted to Richard Rezac, the 74-year-old Chicago-based sculptor known for intimate, handcrafted works that hover between abstraction and subtle references to functional objects. For Sharp, that balance captures the fair’s larger ambition: to make room for presentations that are more searching, and less bound to the pressures of the corporate fair model.
