Electric Op

Musée d'art de Nantes

With a rich collection of modern and contemporary art in which abstraction plays a central role, the Musée d’arts de Nantes and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (United States) are presenting a major new exhibition exploring the historical, theoretical, and formal connections between optical art and video and digital art, from the 1960s to the present day.

In the 1960s, Op art spread widely across the visual arts and popular culture, championed by artists such as Victor Vasarely, Yaacov Agam, and Jesús Rafael Soto. Placing the viewer’s experience at the heart of their approach, Op artists used optical effects to challenge and disrupt visual perception.

Catalogue
Bilingual English/French catalogue of the exhibition Electric Op: From Optical Art to Digital Art, presented at the Musée d’arts de Nantes from 4 April to 31 August 2025.

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Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

In the spring of 2025, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents “Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space”. Featuring approximately 70 works, the exhibition offers an exploration of the visual language of the Portuguese-born artist, who was later naturalised as a French citizen.

Through Vieira da Silva’s references to Portuguese decorative traditions, as well as Cubism and Futurism, the exhibition examines the connections in her painting between abstraction and figuration within real or imaginary spaces.

After Venice, the exhibition will travel to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in the fall of 2025.

Curator
Flavia Frigeri, Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London

Opening Hours
Every day except Tuesday, from 10 AM to 6 PM

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Georges Mathieu

Monnaie de Paris

In 2025, the Monnaie de Paris partners with the Centre Pompidou to present a retrospective of the artist Georges Mathieu, the inventor of lyrical abstraction and a prolific artist.

Both chronological and thematic, the exhibition traces Georges Mathieu’s career from the 1940s—when he contributed to the creation of an international abstract expressionism—through to the 1990s, with a strong emphasis on the Mathieu collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne.

Curation
Christian Briend, Chief Curator of Heritage and Head of Modern Collections at the Centre Pompidou
Éric De Chassey, Director General of the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA)
Béatrice Coullaré, Head of Conservation and Collections at the Monnaie de Paris

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Alice Pauli. Gallerist, Collector, Art Patron

Musée cantonal des beaux-arts de Lausanne (MCBA)

In tribute to the generosity of Alice Pauli, the exhibition celebrates the extraordinary journey of a pioneer. The exhibition features figures of the international contemporary art scene and key personalities of the Swiss art world, bringing together artists whose work this exceptional woman was delighted to see united.

The creations of major figures in contemporary art—among them Louise Nevelson, Giuseppe Penone, Pierre Soulages, and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva—resonate with encounters made during the Salon international de galeries-pilotes. Pauli’s connections to the Swiss artistic scene are reflected in the presentation of works by Louis Soutter, Jean Lecoultre, and Juan Martínez. A room dedicated to the Polish and Yugoslavian art scenes of the 1960s, as well as another devoted to the work of Alicia Penalba, highlight the visionary spirit of a woman driven by a desire to share her artistic emotions and passion for art with the public.

Curation
Camille Lévêque-Claudet, Curator of Ancient and Modern Art, MCBA

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Une brève histoire de fils

Maison de l'Amérique latine

The Maison de l’Amérique latine is pleased to present the exhibition “Une brève histoire de fils” (A short history of thread). Curated by Domitille d’Orgeval, the exhibition brings together 17 internationally acclaimed artists from Latin America, whose work from the 1960s to the present day focuses on thread, weaving, braiding and knotting.

Opening hours
Monday to Friday, 10am to 8pm
Saturday, 2pm to 6pm

Exhibition curation
Domitille d’Orgeval

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MODIGLIANI / ZADKINE, une amitié interrompue

Musée Zadkine, Paris

Following the exhibition dedicated to Chana Orloff, the Musée Zadkine continues to explore the artistic links forged by Zadkine throughout his life. This exhibition is the first to focus on an artistic friendship that has never been explored before: that between the sculptor Ossip Zadkine and the painter Amedeo Modigliani.

Through almost 90 works—paintings, drawings, sculptures, as well as period documents and photographs—we follow the paths taken by Modigliani and Zadkine, in the turbulent and fertile context of Montparnasse from 1910 to 1920. Benefiting from exceptional loans from major institutions—the Centre Pompidou, the Musée de l’Orangerie, and the museums of Milan, Rouen and Dijon—as well as from private collectors, the exhibition brings together, as in their early days, two major artists of the avant-garde, and enables us to renew the threads of an interrupted friendship.

Exhibition curation
Cécilie Champy-Vinas, Head Curator of Heritage, Director of the Musée Zadkine
Thierry Dufrêne, Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Paris Nanterre
With the collaboration of Anne-Cécile Moheng, curator at the Musée Zadkine

Supports/Surfaces. Notre collection à l’affiche

Nationalmusée um Fëschmaart, Luxembourg

On the occasion of major recent acquisitions emblematic of the Supports/Surfaces collective, the Nationalmusée um Fëschmaart in Luxembourg is taking a closer look at this artistic movement by presenting all its works.

By radically opposing the major trends of their time, both ideologically and aesthetically, the members of Supports/Surfaces rejected traditional mediums, deconstructed the codes of painting and explored new forms and techniques. They focus on the materiality of the medium, moving beyond the canvas to produce unusual and highly inventive works. Come and discover the forerunners of contemporary art in France!

Curators & authors of the exhibition catalogue
Michel Polfer, Director of the Nationalmusée um Fëschmaart
Bernard Ceysson, art historian and curator

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InformELLEs

Hessen Kassel Museum, Germany

From 11 October 2024 to 26 January 2025, Hessen Kassel Heritage will be paying homage to women artists and Informalism from the 1950s/60s with “InformELLEs”, a special exhibition at the New Gallery.

Between the early 1950s and the early 1960s, art informel, or informalism, became the dominant art movement in Europe. Completely beyond the classic principles of form and design, the works focused on the open creation process. At first glance, this abstract movement appears to be dominated primarily by art produced by male artists. However, this exhibition now examines art informel from a new perspective, and pays homage to sixteen of its leading female proponents, including Maria Lassnig, Brigitte Meier-Denninghoff, Judit Reigl, Mary Bauermeister, Marie-Louise von Rogister and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. It will not only feature works by these well-known names, but also by rediscovered other long forgotten female artists. On the basis of questions about networks, exhibition participations and reception from a sociology of art perspective, it will also explore the mechanisms of the art business.

The exhibition is a collaborative project organised by Hessen Kassel Heritage, Kunsthalle Schweinfurt and the Emil Schumacher Museum in Hagen in cooperation with the Research Centre of Art Informel at the Art History Institute of the University of Bonn.

Lucio Fontana | UN FUTURO C’È STATO. IL Y A BIEN EU UN FUTUR.

Musée Soulages, Rodez

An Italian art historian once said that there were three essential twentieth-century artists in his country—the founding fathers, as it were: Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio de Chirico and Lucio Fontana.

The exhibition “Lucio Fontana. Un Futuro c’è stato” was born out of a conversation with Pierre Soulages in 2020, during which these very different artists were compared, but linked by their relationship with time and space. Alongside Joan Miró, Fernand Léger and Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana was an artist—more a sculptor than a painter, no doubt—whom Soulages hoped would one day be exhibited in his museum.

This event stands as the first major exhibition on Fontana since his retrospectives at the Musée national d’art moderne Centre Pompidou in 1987 and the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2014. This one in Rodez is in keeping with the museum’s mission of presenting the great names of modern art, and offers a journey through Fontana’s entire œuvre, before and after the War, in Argentina and Italy, an evocation of his creative variety: paintings, papers, sculptures, ceramics and light, and space installations.

Exhibition catalogue (240 pages) bilingual, French and English. Edited by Professor Paolo Campiglio. Published by Gallimard.

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