Architects:Ateliers Jean Nouvel

Year:2025

Photographs:Martin Argyroglo,Axel Dahl,Cyril Marcilhacy,Marc Domage,Thibaut Voisin,Luc Boegly

Category:Museum,Exhibition Center,Refurbishment

Design Team:Ateliers Jean Nouvel

City:Paris

Country:France

Text description provided by the architects. To mark the launch of its new site in the heart of Paris, the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain invites the public to discover its exhibition spaces free of charge, as well as the inaugural exhibition Exposition Générale, showcasing major works from its collection, during the first two days of opening.

The Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain - Since its creation in 1984 by Alain Dominique Perrin, then President of Maison Cartier, the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain has exhibited artists from all walks of life, breaking down barriers between practices and fields of thought. It is a space for artistic dialogue and experimentation where the relationship between creation and exhibition lies at the core of its mission, developed in close collaboration with artists. Built over the years through a groundbreaking international programme, the Fondation's collection reflects its multidisciplinary nature and the breadth of themes it explores in direct dialogue with contemporary issues.

Entirely open to the city through its vast bay windows, Jean Nouvel's architectural project unfolds within the Haussmannian building that once housed the former Grands Magasins du Louvre. Comprising five mobile platforms, its dynamic architecture reimagines the possibilities of exhibition-making, serving all forms of visual expression - photography, cinema, the performing arts, science, and craft. In this striking meeting place where past and future converge, the Fondation Cartier actively participates in the life of the city, engaging with contemporary questions of urban planning and ecology.

Exposition Générale: a new cartography of contemporary creation - Exposition Générale presents the collection of the Fondation Cartier on an unprecedented scale through a selection of iconic works, offering the public the chance to discover or rediscover nearly six hundred artworks by more than one hundred artists from all over the world, including Claudia Andujar, James Turrell, Sarah Sze, Olga de Amaral, Junya Ishigami, Solange Pessoa, David Lynch, Annette Messager, Cai Guo-Qiang, Diller Scofidio + RENFRO, and Chéri Samba.

Reflecting the diversity of the artistic commitments championed by the Fondation Cartier and its openness to the world, Exposition Générale traces forty years of contemporary creation. Organized around four major thematic ensembles, the exhibition proposes an alternative cartography of contemporary creation that reimagines the model of the "encyclopedic museum". Instead, it unfolds as: a fleeting architectural laboratory (Machines d'architecture), a reflection on living worlds and their preservation (Être nature), a space of experimentation in terms of materials and techniques (Making Things), and an exploration of future-oriented narratives combining science, technology, and fiction (Un monde réel). Additional sections to these themes unveil the trajectories and individual or collaborative approaches of some of the leading artists in the Fondation's collection.

The exhibition takes its title from the exhibitions once held at the Grands Magasins du Louvre in the late nineteenth century, in the very building now occupied by the Fondation Cartier. First built in 1855 for the first World Fair, the site hosted events that showcased modernity by gathering objects and products from all over the world, broadening cultural horizons and advancing new fields of expertise. Extending this legacy, the Fondation Cartier has entrusted the scenography of Exposition Générale to Formafantasma studio, which has taken inspiration from various methods of exhibiting. Their project explores and reboots the social and experimental dimensions of these commercial events that accompanied the evolution of museum practices.

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