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Vincenzo La Torre

Chief Editor, Style; Fashion Editor, Post Magazine


When the Fondation Cartier Pour L’Art Contemporain was established in 1984, it wasn’t common for luxury houses to set up cultural entities and engage with the arts.
Long before the opening of institutions such as the Fondazione Prada in Milan and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, Cartier – the jeweller and watchmaker that is part of the Richemont Group – was working with emerging artists and supporting contemporary art through the foundation. The brainchild of Alain Dominique Perrin, then president of Cartier, the museum was until recently located in a striking building designed by Jean Nouvel and situated in the 14th arrondissement of Paris.

This week, during Art Basel Paris, Cartier unveiled a new site for the foundation on Place du Palais-Royal across the street from the Louvre – arguably the world’s most famous museum.
Also designed by Nouvel – the architect behind iconic buildings such as the National Museum of Qatar in Doha and the Institute du Monde Arabe in Paris – the new incarnation of the Fondation is housed in a heritage building dating back to 1855.
Nouvel introduced a groundbreaking innovation in the structure: a system of movable platforms that can be adjusted to different heights to create completely different spaces. Think of them as “floating galleries” that exist vertically across multiple floors and allow curators and exhibition designers to open up spaces or contract them depending on the artworks on display.

For the inaugural exhibition, the curatorial team of the Fondation Cartier – led by director of collections Grazia Quaroni – identified some common threads running through the permanent collection of the foundation to conceive “Exposition Générale”. The show marks four decades of contemporary art through four sections: Machines d’Architecture, Être Nature, Making Things and Un Monde Réel. Each theme reflects topics that the foundation has explored through events, talks and performances throughout its history, ranging from utopian architecture to climate change, new materials and techniques, and science and technology.
One of the core principles of the Fondation Cartier is the importance of exhibition design, which is not just an afterthought to serve the artworks. Rather, it plays a pivotal role in the way pieces are presented. For the design of “Exposition Générale”, the foundation hired Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, the duo behind FormaFantasma, a research-based design studio behind projects such as the most recent Venice Biennale.

“Curating an exhibition is a joyful, but also torturous process of making choices and deciding on an exhibition design,” said Béatrice Grenier, the foundation’s director of strategic projects and international programmes, during a chat on opening day. “We approached FormaFantasma because, beyond practices like product design, they also explore exhibition design as a curatorial tool in their work for museums around the world.”
Farresin explained that when he and Trimarchi started working on this project, before they considered how visitors would encounter and view the exhibitions, one element that stood out to them was the relationship of the building with the outside space and the city. Nouvel’s use of glass facades creates a dialogue between the urban environment and the exhibition space. “Traditionally in a museum you escape reality – [through] the lighting and the climate system – and while you have that too here in this building, there is a stronger connection with reality,” he says.
The designers also relished the opportunity to work within such a flexible framework, which allowed them to experiment with new possibilities but also posed some challenges. The spaces Nouvel conceived are not the usual clinical white boxes typical of most museums – their modular floors and walls allow for a lot of freedom, but also complicate things because most artworks are still made to be shown in very static and minimal environments.

“We felt that we had a responsibility to showcase the building. It was important to respect the intervention of Jean Nouvel and to make sure that the exhibition was still understandable,” says Farresin.
Describing the exhibition as a series of fragments from the history of the foundation without much coherence but strong connections among the artworks, the designers added that they didn’t want to create a linear narrative to guide visitors and that it would be up to the museumgoers “to write the story” as they explore the galleries.
While most museums tend to direct guests through wayfinders such as colour coding and a sense of progression from one space to another, at the Fondation Cartier, you are invited to get lost and explore the artworks from different viewpoints.

“It’s rare in an exhibition space to create relationships with something that is above or below, and to revisit artworks. Usually you get one chance to see an object, but here you can reconsider and revisit objects from new perspectives,” explains the foundation’s Grenier.
“Exposition Générale” displays only a handful of the Fondation Cartier’s extensive holdings, with a selection of pieces from well-known names such as Cai Guo-Qiang, Christian Boltanski and Matthew Barney, to lesser-known creators from South America and Africa.
A painting created by French artist Fabrice Hyber, for instance, was made in partnership with Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, a member of the Yanomami group of indigenous people from the Amazon. It’s just one example of the variety of works on display, which offer a broad and inclusive view of contemporary art without the bias towards the West often prevalent in these kinds of surveys.

Tackling topics such as social science, philosophy, shamanism and anthropology, “Exposition Générale” is not the crowd pleaser you would expect an institution such as Fondation Cartier would choose to inaugurate a new building in the heart of Paris. It’s challenging and inspiring in equal measure.
The building has no empty spaces or passageways but “everything [in it] is exhibition”, as director of collections Quaroni explains. “Sometimes you find jewels in areas that are not particularly charming and could look a little abandoned, but you see masterpieces all over the building. There’s no separation from one work to another. It’s dramatically dense.”

What makes the new Fondation Cartier Pour L’Art Contemporain really stand out in Paris – and beyond – is its relationship with its neighbourhood and the seamless way it embraces the outside world. As you roam the galleries, you come vis-a-vis passersby on busy Rue Saint-Honoré, the imposing facade of the Louvre, and the Haussmannian rooftops that are so unmistakably Parisian.
It’s a completely new take on the museum-going experience that creates an open dialogue with the outside world and turns the often intimidating cultural institution into a welcoming space built on openness and transparency.


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Before the Fondazione Prada and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, there was Fondation Cartier in Paris – and it’s just moved to a new location


Before the Fondazione Prada and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, there was Fondation Cartier in Paris – and it’s just moved to a new location.


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Fondation Cartier unveils its new location at Paris’ Place du Palais-Royal, near the Louvre

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Before the Fondazione Prada and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, there was Fondation Cartier in Paris – and it’s just moved to a new location

Before the Fondazione Prada and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, there was Fondation Cartier in Paris – and it’s just moved to a new location