Museum

Always on the move, like the Centre Pompidou itself, the Museum regularly renews the hanging of its rooms and walls to exhibit, alongside the permanent collection of modern and contemporary art, its new acquisitions, artists or works that have remained on the fringes of art history, to share new critical readings… to arouse and awaken new views. 

Discover here the news of the Museum's rooms. 

The Musée national d'art moderne-Centre de création industrielle offers one of the most comprehensive overviews of 20^th and 21^st century art history:

• on level 5, the founding episodes of modern art from 1905 to 1965, including the avant-garde movements
• on level 4, contemporary works produced from the 1960s onwards, including the most forward-looking pieces, as well as monumental and immersive installations.

The selection of works presented in the museum is regularly renewed. Some rooms may be temporarily closed during these hanging periods. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Co-founded in 2014 by Camille Morineau, an art historian and curator — notably of the landmark exhibition elles@centrepompidou (2009-2011) — the AWARE association works to make women artists visible by producing and sahring free bilingual (French/English) content about their work on its website. This content is accessible to all ages and includes biographies, portraits, video interviews, podcasts, animated series for children aged 7 and up...

As you explore the Museum, use these resources to discover the life and work of around 50 women artists.

From 14 October 2024

Level 4

As you make your way through the Museum, discover 23 artworks recently added to the collection thanks to a joint donation by Galerie Perrotin and 17 of its artists: Jean-Marie Appriou, Genesis Belanger, Sophie Calle, Maurizio Cattelan, Johan Creten, Elmgreen & Dragset, Lionel Estève, Bernard Frize, Laurent Grasso, JR, Bharti Kher, Klara Kristalova, Takashi Murakami, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Paola Pivi, Tavares Strachan, Emma Webster. Together, they offer a broad panorama of the international contemporary art of the last 20 years. 

After studying art in Georgia, Kotchar (1899-1979) spent several years in Moscow starting in 1918, where he engaged with the Russian avant-garde and discovered the work of Pablo Picasso. In 1923, he moved to Paris, settling in the Montparnasse district, where he soon became one of the prominent figures of the École de Paris. Five years later, he exhibited his first Peintures dans l'espace (paintings in space")at the Van Leer Gallery – his most significant contribution to modern art.

Driven by idealistic convictions, Kotchar chose in 1936 to relocate to Soviet Armenia. Despite the regime's hostility – though it did commission him to create powerful monumental sculptures for public spaces – he was ultimately denied permission to return to Paris, where he had experienced his most innovative period.

This tribute takes place as part of the Year of Armenia in France.

7 November 2024 – 10 March 2025

Level 4, room 21

Around fifteen works from the generous donation of Françoise Darmon have joined the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne. Assembled since the 1980s, this collection – positioned at the crossroads of design, contemporary art, and photography – explores post-industrial thought by examining the relationships between object and viewer, production and consumption. These works resonate with Darmon’s personal research, presented in her book Du Sens dans l’Utile (1992), which simultaneously questions both the utility and the meaning of objects.

To celebrate the centenary of Italian conceptual artist and polymath Gianfranco Baruchello (1924-2023), the Centre Pompidou is showcasing two of his works. In the Museum's cinema, Verifica incerta, co-directed with Alberto Griffi in 1964-1965 and part of the Films collection since 2002, will be screened. Meanwhile, in the Film, Video, Sound, and Digital Works collection space, the complete edition of his expansive multimedia project, A partire dal dolce (Sweet as Flavor), conceived in 1978-1979, will be on display.

An initiative of the Baruchello Foundation

At the invitation of the Centre Pompidou, Antoine d’Agata has set up his studio in Room 21bis on level 4 of the Musée for 100 days, during which the artist and author of Mala Noche, Insomnia and Anticorps will review his vast photographic archives, objects, books and films, take a fresh look at his major projects, and draw some sort of conclusion from it all, presented in the form of 256 notebooks. As the project progresses, the completed notebooks will go on display. 

The public can discover the artist’s work process throughout the 100 days during the Museum’s opening hours.

For the first time, eight Parisian museums join forces to celebrate an artist during her lifetime. Barbara Chase-Riboud's (born 1939) career spans seven decades, during which she traveled the world and developed an unparalleled mastery of form. This exhibition will present a series of monumental sculptures, which demonstrate the power of bronze and silk, at the heart of the sculptor's work, weaving links between cultures, histories, and materials.
In dialogue with the contemporary artists in the National Museum of Modern Art collection, this installation brings together a selection of monumental works such as Malcolm X from several discrete series offering an overview of the diversity of her œuvre.

Exhibition jointly organised by the Centre Pompidou, the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, the Musée d'Orsay, the Musée du Louvre, the Philharmonie de Paris, the Musée Guimet, the Palais de Tokyo and the Palais de la Porte Dorée.
With the generous support of the Ford Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art. 

A tireless creator, Maurice Lemaître (1926-2018) is a key figure in the Lettrist movement founded by Isidore Isou. In the interests of transcending the boundaries of art and constant creativity, Lemaître developed a coded, totalising, hypergraphic form of notation, drawing on all known and future graphie systems. He mastered and innovated in the fields of photography, experimental film and graphies.

Thanks to a generous donation from the artist that enriches the collection, this presentation offers a comprehensive view of painter Sean Scully's career (born in 1945 in Dublin, residing in the United States since 1975), from the early 1970s to his most recent works. It reflects Scully's romantic ambition to "make visible what we feel" and his critical distance from the rigidity of abstraction, favoring rhythm over form through a uniquely complex and nuanced exploration of color.

Sean Scully: a romantic geometry of colors

Lena Vandrey (1941, Poland - 2018, France) was self-taught, writing poems and creating paintings and sculptures using recycled materials that she gathered. As an openly lesbian and feminist artist, she created a series of cycles throughout her entire life (Auschwitz, Amazones, Amantes, Anges) relating to historic, symbolic and mythological subjects, in which she explored the identity of women.

The Centre Pompidou and the Centre des Monuments Nationaux have joined forces to celebrate the radical literary and poetic work of Pierre Guyotat (1940-2020).

At the Museum, visitors will find a selection of drawings created in the final years of his life, along with the installation Clic-Clac, which gathers cherished objects from his desk and apartment. Meanwhile, at the Cité Internationale de la Langue Française, his Leçons sur la langue française are on display. In both cases, the exhibition design has been entrusted to architect Patrick Bouchain, a close friend of the artist.

In partnership with Association Pierre Guyotat

Because of their sexually explicit or violent nature, some of the works presented in this room may offend the public. Minors are strongly advised not to enter this room.

From 14 October 2024

Level 4, room 34

An unexpected meeting of minds between Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) and Paul Virilio (1932-2018), two of the most important French intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century, through their respective approaches to photography.

In the late 1950s, they each started to put together two quite distinct corpuses of photographs, for the purposes of their research.
As a sociologist and ethnologist, Bourdieu embraced the photographic experience as a crucial element, shaping his work in the field, while for city planer and philosopher Virilio, photography helped decipher his era and put his thoughts into images, like an archaeologist of the future. 

The exhibition was conceived with Christine Frisinghelli, Franz Schultheis and Sophie Virilio.

It is organized in cooperation with Camera Austria in Graz, the Pierre Bourdieu Foundation and the Association Atelier Paul Virilio.

With this presentation, the Musée National d’Art Moderne pays tribute to passionate and visionary Parisian gallery owners Liliane and Michel Durand-Dessert, whose adventure began in Paris in 1975. Between 1991 and 2023, the couple made a gift of 155 works to the museum, supplemented last year by dozens of books on 20th century artists and archives documenting the history of the gallery.

The Museum is presenting a collection of paintings by Korean artist Bang Hai Ja (Seoul, 1937-Aubenas, 2022) – most of which recently entered the collection through a donation from her family – accompanied by two archival display cases and a documentary film.

A unique figure in the art history that bridges Korea and France, Bang Hai Ja divided her life between Paris (where she settled in 1961), Seoul, and Ajoux in the Ardèche region. Her abstract, spiritual work, deeply rooted in both cultures (drawing on traditional hanji paper, pure pigments…), appears itself as a membrane suspended between two worlds.

A tribute to the soviet conceptual artist, Ilya Kabakov (1933-2023) who died a year ago, this exhibition presents a selection of works from his collections, including a previously unseen installation, Two Times (2020). 

Andrea Branzi (1938-2023) is a major figure in the history and theory of design and architecture. A co-founder of the radical Archizoom group in 1966, he also participated in the Alchimia and Memphis groups. Opposed to the "rationalist myth" of the project, Branzi questioned how humanity relates to its environment.

The daughter of Spanish sculptor Julio González (1876-1942), Roberta González (1909-1976) was born in Paris into an artistic family. Exhibited by gallerists Jeanne Bucher and Colette Allendy, she was nominated by the Hallmark Award in 1949, which allowed her to exhibit in the USA and Latin America. 
From the 1960s, she dedicated much of her time to promoting her father's work, of which she donated more than 200 pieces to the Musée National d'Art Moderne.

In 2021, Bruno Decharme donated an astonishing body of outsider art, including nearly a thousand works from his collection, to the Centre Pompidou. The museum regularly updates themed presentations on Levels 4 and 5 to gradually reveal this major collection to the public. 

The concurrent new series of monthly meetings "AB/CP - Art Brut au Centre Pompidou" (Outsider Art at the Centre Pompidou) provides an opportunity to explore the full riches of this collection, with contributions by specialists and the presentation of films, readings and creations.

Many 20th century artists – such as Alberto Giacometti, Brassaï, Jean Arp, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska ou Constantin Brancusi – were fascinated by archaic statuettes with their pure forms. In them they found a universal language that cornes down through the millennia, and a source of inspiration for their own works in a technical (direct carving) and aesthetic (whiteness, geometry, polished) perspective.

This dialogue between modern art and Antiquity benefits from exceptional loans by the Louvre Museum.

In 2012, collectors Florence and Daniel Guerlain donated some 1,200 drawings to the Musée national d’art moderne. They have since continued to demonstrate great generosity, donating several works by the winners of the drawing award they initiated. The Centre Pompidou is exhibiting some 30 pieces that now enhance its Cabinet d'Art Graphique to the point of transforming its very physiognomy.

The restoration and exhibition of Esprits de Paris was generously supported by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.

Echo: Meeting with Robin Rimbaud (alias Scanner), on 6 December 2024 at 7pm.

3 décembre 2024 – 10 mars 2025
Niveau 4, salle 30