Exhibitions

Suzanne Valadon

15 January – 26 May 2025

 Temporary exhibition 
 Gallery 2, level 6

Some 200 works, including drawings and paintings—the artist's preferred mediums—are presented across five thematic sections to trace the unique career path of Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938), from her early days as a sought-after model in Montmartre to her swift recognition as an artist by her peers and critics. Bold and overtly modern, standing apart from the dominant movements of her time, Valadon chose to paint reality and depict bodies without artifice or voyeurism. She was the first woman to paint a large-scale frontal male nude.

Infos and booking in the agenda

Hans Hollein
transFORMS

5 March – 2 June 2025

 Temporary exhibition 
 Gallery 4, level 1

This monographic exhibition is dedicated to Austrian architect Hans Hollein (1934-2014), most commonly associated with the postmodernist movement following his participation in the inaugural Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980 and his colonnaded façade proposal for the Strada Novissima project. Bringing together the most emblematic pieces from an œuvre spanning over fifty years, the exhibition offers a fresh perspective on the coherence of his artistic and critical approach, viewed through the lens of his engagement with various movements that shaped the post-avant-garde from the 1960s to the 1980s—from informal art to conceptual art, including radical architecture.

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Paris noir
Artistic Movements and Anticolonial Struggles, 1950–2000

19 March – 30 June 2025

 Temporary exhibition 
 Gallery 1, level 6

From the creation of the journal Présence Africaine to Revue Noire, "Paris Noir" traces the presence and influence of Black artists in France from the 1940s to the 2000s. The exhibition highlights 150 African and Afro-descendant artists, from Africa to the Americas, whose works have often never been shown in France. All contributed to a cosmopolitan Paris—a place of resistance and creativity—that fostered a wide variety of practices, from identity awareness to the search for transcultural artistic languages. Their impact is particularly significant in the redefinition of modernities and postmodernities. The exhibition explores half a century of struggles for emancipation, from African independence movements to the fall of apartheid, including battles against racism in France.

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In parallel, from April 3 to 7, 2025:
Sarah Maldoror – screenings, readings, and discussions celebrating the filmmaker

Énormément bizarre
Jean Chatelus collection,
donated by Fondation Antoine de Galbert

26 March – 30 June 2025

 Temporary exhibition 

 Gallery 3, level 1

Jean Chatelus, who passed away in 2021 at the age of 82, was a Lyon-born historian and lecturer at the Sorbonne. Throughout his life, he amassed a unique collection, driven more by an impulse to accumulate than by a traditional collector’s approach.  Comprising nearly 400 pieces—sculptures, installations, paintings, photographs, drawings, votive and vernacular objects—the collection explores themes of the body, death, and the fleeting nature of life.

Presented almost in its entirety, the collection reflects Chatelus’s evolving tastes: from an early fascination with Surrealism and repurposed objects, to a later focus on body art. It also reveals his keen interest in non-Western ethnographic artifacts, folk traditions, and the works of contemporary art’s outsiders and enfant terribles, including Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Christian Boltanski, Yayoi Kusama, Michel Journiac, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, Nam June Paik, Joana Vasconcelos, Andres Serrano, and Wim Delvoye.

Wolfgang Tillmans
Rien ne nous y préparait – Tout nous y préparait

13 June – 22 September 2025

 Temporary exhibition 
 Bibliothèque publique d’information, level 2

To conclude the program within the building, which will close for five years of renovation, German artist Wolfgang Tillmans (born in 1968, Germany) has been given carte blanche to take over the 6,000 m² of Level 2 of the Bibliothèque publique d’information (Bpi). He will explore both the library’s form—its architecture and layout—and its functions, such as the transmission of knowledge, accessibility, and resource sharing, through the lens of his aesthetic universe. Rooted in the counterculture spirit of the early 1990s, Tillmans' photographic work delves into the profound transformation of media and information platforms in our time. By proposing new ways of making, viewing, and confronting images—both with each other and across disciplines such as video, music, text, and performance—he invites us to embrace a renewed humanism.