Pavec considers art history as an evolving field, where overlooked artistic trajectories emerge alongside new perspectives the works we thought we knew best.

Founded in Paris in 2018 by art historian Pauline Pavec and artist Quentin Derouet, Pavec gallery is located in the Marais, just steps from Place des Vosges. Its programme brings nineteenth- and twentieth-century art into focus through contemporary perspectives, offering fresh insights into the works and narratives of modernity.

Research lies at the core of the gallery’s identity. Drawing on artworks, archives, and primary sources, the gallery conducts long-term scholarly research on the artists it represents and supports. Its projects are developed in close collaboration with researchers, art historians, museum curators, and institutions in France and internationally, in order to document the works, deepen knowledge of them, and enrich their contextualization.

For several years, the gallery has conducted research on women artists of modernity, revealing trajectories that have remained on the margins of historiography. It applies this same scholarly rigor to major figures in art history, convinced that the field's renewal comes as much from rediscovering forgotten narratives as from bringing new perspectives to works we thought we knew best.
Archives, research, exhibitions, and publications are thus part of the same long-term endeavor: to deepen our understanding of the works, restore the richness and complexity of their contexts, and open up new perspectives from the present, in relation to contemporary questions and concerns.

This approach takes shape through exhibitions that bring historical figures into dialogue with contemporary artists, revealing artistic lineages, correspondences, and new perspectives on the works, as well as through scholarly catalogues developed with specialists. Through its participation in international art fairs and collaborations with museums and institutions in France and abroad, the gallery places its research within an international circulation of artworks and knowledge.

In 2026, the gallery founded Umbra, a research journal devoted to lesser-explored territories of art history and historiography. Conceived as a space for intellectual freedom, research, and the circulation of knowledge, Umbra extends a conviction that runs through the gallery’s entire programme: art history is never static, it remains a living field, continually open to new perspectives.

Dedicated to reinterpreting modern art through the lens of contemporary sensibilities, the gallery is more than an exhibition space: it is a site of reflection, where works from the 19th and 20th centuries are brought back into circulation and set into dialogue with the present and with living artists.