Fondation Cartier Reopens with a Monumental Archival Exhibition

Stepping inside the new Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain – now housed within the reimagined Louvre des Antiquaires complex at Place du Palais-Royal – feels like walking into a living organism. Nothing is fixed: walls, floors and ceilings can shift from one exhibition to the next. With five times more exhibition space than its previous home on Boulevard Raspail, the Fondation’s new site, designed by Jean Nouvel, invites visitors to experience architecture as something fluid and evolving, like art itself.

The opening exhibition, Exposition Générale (open to visitors from October 25), dives into the foundation’s 40-year-old archive, showing 600 works by more than 100 artists spread across four themes: Machines d’architecture, Être nature, Making Things and Un monde réel.

The exhibition layout unfolds like a labyrinth, each turn revealing something unexpected. The positioning of the artworks in dialogue with one another creates new perspectives on well-known pieces. Even the glass façade plays a role in the curation: the movement of passersbys on the streets of Paris, and the silhouette of the Louvre across the street, become a living tableaux, extending the exhibition into the outside world.

In the following conversation, Béatrice Grenier, who led the curatorial process for the opening show, reflects on the six-year journey leading up to Exposition Générale, and how artists like James Turrell and Freddy Mamani reimagined their works for this new chapter in the Fondation’s history.

When did you start curating this opening exhibition?

BÉATRICE GRENIER: Formally, we really started two years ago on the actual exhibition, really honing down the concept and selection. But there was a whole phase of work that we did in relation to the collection because the foundation hadn’t synthesized itself into determining its major axis of programming. It had been kind of ongoing. So, opening a new building, a new chapter, forced us to really rethink: what is our mandate? What are the important subject matters that we want to continue to carry on in the programme? So, I would say it’s been since I joined really the foundation, which is almost six years ago now.

When you opened the collection, was there anything that you found surprising or something that stood out that you weren’t expecting?

BG I think my biggest surprise and joy was to find that there were so many works that were in-between disciplines. That actually forced us to continuously decide whether we should or should not determine themes or disciplines. Because it is true that the beauty of contemporary art is that it’s trying to always challenge any form of classification. And it is also what we try to promote as an institution, which is now in front of the Louvre, which is the classification engine of the western world. To say, well actually, maybe we should never be so confident about the finite boundaries of art. 

I guess that ties in with the architectural marvel of this space. It must be so exciting for artists who can come here and see that they can do anything. That their art doesn’t have to be created to fit the space…

BG Yes, it is really placing at the starting point of the exhibition [the question], “What is the museum?”, because we’re conceiving a new architecture for every exhibition. So, you’re conditioning the way that you’ll see the exhibition. It’s this kind of tension about speculating on “what is the museum?” for every exhibition that will make, I think, this new Fondation Cartier an even more dynamic cultural policy. 

I read that Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s EXIT (2008) was updated with new data. Were there any other works that you had conversations with the artists in terms of how it was going to be placed, or if they were going to update the piece?

BG Yeah, that work is very important in the collection because it’s made from data and it forces the collection to think of itself as something that needs to evolve with time. But otherwise, yes we spoke to many artists of the collection in positioning the work, in creating these vis-à-vis. But also some works were redrawn for these spaces. For example, the James Turrell work [Skeet, 1976], he redesigned it for this space. There is also Salon de Eventos (2018) by Freddy Mamani, a Bolivian architect based in El Alto, and he redesigned the plan that he had conceived initially when we first exhibited the work. It’s very powerful because it’s site-specific, it’s visible from the street and when you are inside that space you see, directly, the Louvre across the street. So, it is really posing the question of replacing vernacular architecture in a very iconic location. Couldn’t be more iconic. 

Exposition Générale is on view at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain from October 25, 2025 until August 23, 2026.