
Coming soon in Venise
La Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain par Jean Nouvel
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About the exhibition
In collaboration with the Fondazione Giorgio Cini
From May 10 to September 14, 2025, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, presents at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, the innovative design concepts imagined by Jean Nouvel for its future spaces in the exhibition, The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain by Jean Nouvel.
Since its creation in 1984, the Fondation Cartier has placed architecture at the heart of its programming positing it as an enabler of interdisciplinary dialogue. Its historic building designed by Jean Nouvel and inaugurated in 1994 on Boulevard Raspail, Paris, broke all conventions of exhibition making by its apparent immateriality as a glass and steel structure.
Thirty years later, the Fondation Cartier commissioned to Jean Nouvel the transformation of a mid-19th century Haussmannian building, set to open late 2025 at 2 Place du Palais-Royal, Paris, next to the Louvre. Pushing the boundaries of architectural design, it embodies the Fondation’s mission to engage all forms of contemporary creation.
In the exhibition presented at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, visitors encounter the premises of the new architecture of the Fondation Cartier. A large-scale sectional model of the new spaces reveals the potential of an architecture that is a dynamic exhibition-making tool. Five platforms which can be adjusted to different heights offer the possibility of creating multiple combinations of volumes, voids and spaces, altogether creating unprecedent imaginative potential for multidisciplinary programming.
The sensations and experience of the architectural landscape of the Fondation Cartier’s new address are evoked within the exhibition space through a display including projections, 1:1 scale photographs, plans and prototypes. The scenography demonstrates in particular the effects of the retractable ceilings that temper natural light, as well as those of the mechanical, guard rails which add or subtract possible perspectives on the immediate urban surroundings. The possibility of perpetual mutation, evoked by the mobility of the exhibition spaces, captures the ambition of architecture as a discipline addressed to the broad spectrum of human creativity, including the visual arts, performance, technology, science and philosophy.
The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain by Jean Nouvel stages the architect’s desire to create spaces that are not merely buildings but cultural environments in and of themselves, responding to what is already present at a given site. In Venice, the exhibition unfolds with a backdrop of a vista of the museum-city. Through the Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s windows, the visitor will glimpse at the cityscape beyond San Giorgio Maggiore, opposite of the Grand Canal. The superimposition of the exhibition within to the Venetian vista without echoes the context of the new Fondation Cartier, a building project in the epicenter of historical Paris. Further, the presentation of a small glass engraving of the Fondation Cartier’s current and iconic building on boulevard Raspail, in addition to a video of Jean Nouvel’s past museographic projects demonstrate the contextualist approach.
The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain by Jean Nouvel offers the public a compelling vision for architecture as a discipline that synthesizes the arts, coexisting in a dynamic, ever-evolving relationship through exhibition making.
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