Exposition générale

The Fondation Cartier's collection, a reflection of the institution's history, programme, and openness to the world in all its diversity, charts forty years of international contemporary creation. With emblematic works and elements chosen from exhibitions that have infused its programme since its creation in 1984, the Exposition Générale presents the guiding principles of this unique heritage. It reveals the lively character of a collection which, throughout the Fondation's history, has been brought together thanks to the exhibitions held there.

Organised around four main elements that are present throughout the Collection, the Exposition Générale presents the diversity of the institution's artistic commitments. It starts with an architectural laboratory (Machines d’Architecture) where models, drawings, fragments, and installations, in dialogue with the urban environment, demonstrate a variety of approaches to and critical adaptations of architecture. Composing a reinvented town, these shapes mingle with living worlds that invite the onlooker to query the role of the institution in conserving endangered ecosystems and the limits of anthropocentrism (Être Nature). The exhibition also explores creation as a space for experimentation and breaking down barriers, showing how new interactions between art, crafts, and design rejuvenate plastic art forms (Making Things). Finally, it is also a stage for artistic expression, combining technology, fiction, and scientific knowledge, which establishes other ways of interpreting and experiencing the world (Un Monde Réel). In addition to these themed exhibitions, adjacent presentations reveal the individual or collaborative paths and approaches of some of the key artists in the collection. 

The Exposition Générale weaves human and non-human forms and cultures, as well as techniques and artistic forms of expression that are liberated from the traditional hierarchy of fine arts. In doing so, it draws a new map of contemporary creation that breaks away from conventional museum compendiums, bringing new life and purpose to the institution's function as a public space for experimentation and the production of new knowledge.  

Exposition Générale takes its name from the exhibitions organised by the Grands Magasins du Louvre as of the end of the 19th century in the Haussmannian building that the Fondation Cartier occupies today, which was built for the first Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855. Throughout its entire history, this building has continually been reinvented as an exhibition site, revealing strong continuity between its successive transformations and the spatial installation arrangements that have accompanied them. Its evolution clearly and faithfully demonstrates the history of the development of modern uses of architecture.  It was first designed as the Grand Hôtel (c. 1855-1880) to house visitors to the Exposition Universelle, and was gradually transformed into the Grands Magasins (1880-1977), in which its large reception areas became retail exhibit zones, veritable "retail palaces" that people would visit "as if they were going to a museum. This vocation was prolonged with the Louvre des Antiquaires (1977-2018), whose spatial organisation, comprising a series of boutiques linked by lengthy corridors, included a long line of display windows behind which artwork and decorative arts were regularly exhibited. Bringing together objects and merchandise from a wide range of places, these events contributed to the expansion of the cultural sphere, the circulation of new skills, the democratisation of material culture and 19th-century artefacts – a story that echoes the collection's philosophy today.

The spatial installation of Exposition Générale, designed by Formafantasma studio, renders visible the exhibition mechanisms and updates the social and experimental dimension of the "Expositions Générales" and other events that have accompanied the evolution of museum practices. Formafantasma designs a three-dimensional device that interacts with the building's dynamic architecture, exploiting its different vistas and heights. The textile supports – modular fabric structures mounted on aluminium sections and containing their own lighting system – guide the visitor among the works and the exhibition's signage. 

Exposition Générale's extension into the town embraces, above and beyond its building, the architectural heritage of its new urban environment: the Place du Palais-Royal and the Galerie Valois, an underground passageway that used to link the Metro to major department stores, are home to artistic contributions that prolong the exhibition's key elements out into the town. From October 2025 to February 2026, a series of drawings by Andrea Branzi that illustrate her 2008 project for Grand Paris, developed together with Italian architect Stefano Boeri, is presented in the Galerie Valois. By enhancing its porosity with the town and public areas, the Fondation Cartier reasserts its attachment to Paris, making the exhibition site a place in tune with its time, where narratives, knowledge, and forms can collectively be produced.