The Salon du Dessin is the world’s leading event showcasing the very best in Old, Modern and Contemporary art. It is also the central event for all the peripheral shows and sales focusing on paper- based arts during Drawing week (La Semaine du Dessin) when Paris becomes the global capital of drawing for a week.

With 39 exhibitors (like every year) and a significant proportion of foreign galleries (17 from 8 different countries), the 32th edition of the Salon du Dessin will be welcoming 4 new exhibitors who have never before exhibited at the Salon du Dessin: the Roman gallery Paolo Antonacci, the London gallery Emanuel von Baeyer, François Delestre Fine Arts, which has opened a branch in Paris after many years in London, and the Galerie 1900-2000, which will show a wide selection of works on paper related to Surrealism and the 20th century avant-garde.

Jean Dubuffet on paper
The museum exhibition within the Salon has been entrusted to the Fondation Dubuffet and will be one of the first events in 2024 to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Through a selection of 55 works on paper produced between 1935 and 1985, the Fondation Dubuffet will highlight the diversity and inventiveness of the techniques used the artist. As you will see, Dubuffet was able to make paper ‘speak’ by distorting, scratching, painting, cutting and reassembling.

The other guest of honor will be the Tavolozza Foundation, founded in 2001 by the drawing collector Katrin Bellinger. Fascinated by the artistic process and the mystery that surrounds it, she chose to focus on a single theme: the artist at work, and her collection today includes more than 1,800 drawings, paintings, engravings, photographs and sculptures from the Renaissance to the present day, a selection of which will be exhibited at Salon du Dessin. The Tavolozza Foundation, which derives its name from the Italian work for ‘palette’, aims to make works on paper more accessible to the public and to raise awareness of this medium by financing exhibitions and their catalogs, acquisitions and scientific publications.

Traveling artists and travel drawing
The International Meetings of the Salon du dessin will focus on the theme Travelling artists: forms and functions of travel drawings. The two days of study, led by Marco Simone Bolzoni, Curator of Old Master and 19th Century drawings at the Debra and Leon Black Collection in New York, will focus more particularly on the period between the Renaissance to the 17th century.

Elsa Zylberstein patron of the charity dinner for the Institut Curie
For the second year, the Salon du Dessin is organizing a charity gala dinner for 150 guests on Thursday 21 March in the Salons d’Honneur of the Palais Brongniart, the proceeds of which will be donated to the Institut Curie. The Institut Curie is the leading French research center in the fight against cancer, combining an internationally renowned research center and a cutting-edge hospital complex which treats all cancers, including the rarest.

Salon du Dessin, epicenter of numerous events around drawing
The Salon du Dessin is the epicenter of numerous events both inside and outside the fair, making Paris the global capital of drawing for a week. For the 24th consecutive year, the Salon du Dessin, has organized Drawing week, a popular off-site program, in partnership with around twenty institutions including the Archives Nationales, the musée de l’Armée – Invalides, the Beaux-Arts de Paris, the BnF, the musée Condé - Château de Chantilly, the Château de Fontainebleau, the musée Jean-Jacques Henner, the Collection Emile Hermès, INHA, the musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Maison Balzac, the musée du Domaine Royal de Marly, the musée de Montmartre, the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, the musée d’Orsay, the musée des Années Trente, the Musée d’Art Moderne - Centre Pompidou, and the Maison de Victor Hugo.

The partnership with Drawing Now Art Fair, initiated two years ago, will also be reiterated and will allow visitors to one of the fairs reduced price access to the other (€25 to visit both fairs instead of €32) and thus promote visits to the both fairs. As curators of artworks on paper from foreign museums (also responsible for prints) will be in Paris for the Salon de Dessin, they will also be able to visit the third edition of the Paris Print Fair.

Since 2010, the Contemporary Drawing Prize from the Daniel & Florence Guerlain Foundation, created in 2007, has been awarded at the Salon du Dessin. The three nominees for the 2024 Prize are the Lebanese Lamia Joreige, born in 1972, the Israeli Amir Nave, born in 1974 and the Greek Christos Venetis, born in 1967. Their work will be shown at the Salon du Dessin where the name of the winner will be announced on Thursday 21 March 2024.

Each year the magazine Le Petit Léonard which initiated a Children’s Drawing Competition in partnership with the Salon du Dessin, receives hundreds of drawings from all over mainland France and overseas. This year the theme of the competition, open to all children aged between 7 and 14, will be “Draw a real or imaginary journey”. The drawings of 3 winners from each of the 3 age groups will be exhibited at the Salon du Dessin among drawings by great masters.