It's sad but that's how it is: in 2025, the Center Pompidou will close its pipes for five years of work. Before this five-year period of artistic fallowness, the place has designed a program to end in style. Among the final exhibitions presented, we discover a tribute to a pioneering painter, a celebration of black Paris and a carte blanche which will take place in the empty Bpi. Ciao Pompidou!
Suzanne Valadon
Suzanne Valadon back in the center – of Paris and museum attention. Although her studio-apartment was opened to the public in 2014 in the Montmartre museum, it has been more than fifty years – it was in 1967 – since Suzanne Valadon's work had been the subject of a major exhibition. . An incongruity erased by the Center Pompidou which returns from January 15 to May 26, 2025 on its journey in the artistic sphere of the – approximately – first half of the 20th century. Through 200 works – paintings and drawings – some of which are rarely or not shown, Beaubourg will tell how Valadon became a key personality in the empowerment of women artists, between her obstinacy in wanting to represent reality at all costs during the era of Cubism and beginner abstract art, and its representation (pioneering by a woman) of the male nude in large format. An exhibition which will talk about Parisian Bohemia – Valadon was an emblem of the Montmartre musette – and in which photos and manuscripts as well as paintings by contemporary women artists will be presented.
When ? from January 15 to May 26, 2025
Or ? Center Pompidou, rue Saint-Martin, Paris 4th.
Paris Black
Among the last exhibitions preceding the closure of Beaubourg, this is the one that catches our eye the most. From March 19 to June 30, 2025, Pompidou will present Paris Black celebrating the works of 150 Afro-descendant artists in arty Paris of the second half of the 20th century. Through this retrospective which will explore many artistic movements (surrealism, Afro-Atlantic abstraction, free figuration, etc.), the institution will attempt to question the identity awareness of these artists, their desires for emancipation, but also their key role in the “redefinition modernities and postmodernities. Also see: five installations and as many contemporary views on the subject, created especially for the exhibition by the artists Bili Bidjocka, Valérie John, Nathalie Leroy Fiévée, Jay Ramier and Shuck One.
-When ? From March 19 to June 30, 2025
Or ? Center Pompidou, rue Saint-Martin, Paris 4ᵉ.
Wolfgang Tillmans – Nothing prepared us for this – Everything prepared us for this
Forever the last exhibition before the work! From June 13 to September 22, the Center Pompidou will hand over the keys to the 6,000 square meters of the Bpi, almost completely emptied, to Wolfgang Tillmans. The German visual artist should explore the notions of community, freedom and popular culture, using many mediums (photos of course, but also videos, music, texts, etc.), while telescoping the museum's archives, creations specially made for the exhibition and the library. And at the end, you will have the right to be as moved as Frank Ocean on the cover of Blondedirected by… Wolfgang Tillmans.
When ? from June 13 to September 22, 2025.
