© Jean Nouvel / Adagp, Paris, 2025. Photo © Luc Boegly
View from platform 1_Alessandro Mendini_Bodys Isek Kengelez_Alessandro Mendini and Peter Halley. Exhibition view. Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2025. Photo © Marc Domage.
40 years after its opening, the Cartier Foundation is starting a brand new life. It has just left its glass and steel building inaugurated in 1994 in Montparnasse and moved to a majestic Haussmannian building at Palais Royal, right across from the Louvre. In doing so, the Foundation not only changed neighborhoods, but also changed dimensions. It now hopes some of the 9 million visitors going to the Louvre each year (not counting the 4 who left with the family jewels on October 19…) will cross Rue de Rivoli to see its exhibitions. The new head of the institution, Chris Dercon, recently said that he was hoping to triple the number of visitors coming to the Cartier Foundation. The quiet days on boulevard Raspail are over.
Bernie Krause and Soundwalk Collective_Night wouldn’t be night without the cricket.jpg Photo © Marc Domage. Exhibition view. Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2025. Photo © Marc Domage
The Fondation Cartier is opening its doors with a massive exhibition called Exposition Générale. It revisits 40 years of exhibitions since 1984 with about 600 works by 100 artists. Contrary to its neighbors, Bourse de Commerce, owned by the Pinault family, or the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the Cartier Foundation does not have a permanent collection. Cartier’s approach to art has been radically different. It does not show the work of artists, rather, it commissions artists from around the world - from Japan to indigenous people from the Amazon, to Africa to Europe - to create site specific works. It also has a multidisciplinary approach connecting art with philosophy, fashion, sound, video, architecture, mathematics, data, films, botany. Jean Paul Gaultier’s exhibition was only showing garments made of bread, for instance. Hiroshi Sugimoto showed mathematical models. There was once the wreckage of a plane in the middle of its exhibition hall and insects of Etre Nature filled the space. At its beginnings, the foundation even exposed Ferraris.
Exhibition view. Malik Sidibe. Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2025. Photo © Marc Domage.
Exposition Générale is divided into 4 themes reinterpreting the encyclopedic museum model: architecture (Machines d’architecture), a reflexion on living worlds and their preservation (Etre Nature), a space for experimentation with materials and techniques (Making Things), and Un Monde Réel, blending science, technology and fiction.
Santidio Pereira_Junya Ishigami_Luiz Zerbini. Exhibition view. Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2025. Photo © Marc Domage.
The exploration of each of these themes is an extraordinary voyage through time and ideas. For architecture, for instance, the Foundation is presenting Petite Cathédrale, by Alessandro Mendini, a small scale oecumenical church playing with our sense of scale. Next to it, Junya Ishigami, with his Chapel of the Valley, imagines a future in which the divide between nature and architecture disappears.
Etre Nature takes visitors on a journey around the world to examine our relations with the natural world, from Bernie Krause’s poetic installation Night Would Not Be Night Without The Cricket, to Claudia Anduja’s photography of the Yanomami people, to drawings and paintings from Indigenous people.
Making Things looks at how contemporary artists are blending the border between art and ancestral techniques, with works by Olga de Amaral monumental Muro en rojos, Andrea Branzi, Jean-Michel Othoniel and even Issey Miyake. Un Monde Réel blends dreams and mathematics and science, scientific data, art , cosmology with works from Sarah Sze about the proliferation of digital images to Panamarenko’s submarine to the drawings of Shantaran Chintya Tumbada, an Indian artist from the Warli Community.
Through 3 levels and 6,500 sqm of exhibition space, the Fondation Cartier takes us on an extraordinary journey of the wonders of the human mind. We leave the Foundation different from when we stepped into it.
~Jean-Sébastien Stehli
Freddy Mamani_Salon de Eventos. Exhibition view. Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2025. Photo © Marc Domage.
