Exposition Générale

In 2020, Cartier began transforming the site under architect Jean Nouvel’s direction to house the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. ​The redesign preserves key 19th-century architectural elements while introducing innovative, modular spaces for exhibitions and cultural activities.

5 mobile platforms ranging from 363 sm for the largest to 200 sm for the smallest, distributed lengthwise, operated via a system of pulleys and cables, can be placed in 11 different vertical positions, from −1 to the ceiling, allowing for numerous combinations of volumes, verticalities, and modulations of light, multiplying the possibilities for programming and exhibiting.

At street level, the fully glazed facade along Rue de Rivoli and Rue Saint-Honoré allows the gaze to traverse the space from one street to another, blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior.

New types of exhibitions will take advantage of these building’s architectural possibilities to create and vary visual connections and pathways. Each artistic project will offer a renewed experience of the building, placing it at the heart of the curatorial reflection.

To mark the inauguration of this new venue, the Fondation Cartier is presenting Exposition Générale, a selection of iconic works and fragments of exhibitions that today constitute the main thrust of its Collection.
The exhibition, featuring 600 works by over 100 artists, is structured around four themes: Machines d’architecture, exploring transformative architectural visions; Être nature, focusing on the relationship between art and the living world; Making Things, celebrating cross-disciplinary artistic experimentation; and Un monde réel, blending science, technology, and fiction. ​

The exhibition design by Formafantasma addresses the site’s history as a space of display, the heterogeneity of artworks and media presented, and approaches Jean Nouvel’s architecture for the Fondation Cartier not as a neutral container for art but a spatial device: a machine that continuously redefine volumes, heights, and relationships. Within this context, exhibition design becomes a process of alignment with an existing system rather than an act of imposition. The building challenges the linear logic that traditionally structures exhibitions.

In continuity with strategies previously developed by Formafantasma in Mondo Reale (Fondation Cartier, Triennale Milano, 2021), the exhibition design operates through minimal yet infrastructural gestures that deliberately present multiple perspectives, fostering relationships between artists. Plaster walls are replaced by a lightweight, modular system composed of metal structures and textile surfaces, deployed throughout the exhibition to create temporary and permeable partitions. Color is used selectively to highlight what the curators refer to as “solo shows”: spatial concentrations that function as moments of focus within the broader chapters of the exhibition, dedicated to one or more artists.

Vertical, luminescent lanterns, developed in collaboration with Flos, function as spatial markers, allowing visitors to navigate intuitively within an architecture defined by shifting platforms, variable heights, and overlapping sightlines.

These space conformations leads Formafantasma to reimagine new ways of exhibit, such as the use of heights to create floating galleries: aerial rooms where artworks are suspended in space. This approach established unexpected connections between works in ways that traditional exhibitions rarely allow, enabling both vertical and horizontal relationships.

Two towers work with this idea too, becoming landmarks within the exhibition. The first one, underneath the second platform, works as a luminous chamber, hosting the work of Andrei Ujica; the second one, placed exactly in the middle of the building, works as a link between the ground floor and the first floor, creating connections between the Chaco and the Yanomami communities, both part of the Forest section.