From Céret to Nîmes, a trail through southern Occitanie

Between the unmissable Carré d’Art, the museum-library PAB (Pierre André Benoit Museum-Library), and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Céret, this route reveals a remarkable wealth of collections and high-quality contemporary art venues, housed in buildings as eclectic as a former industrial wasteland transformed into the CRAC Occitanie or a former wine cellar now home to the Musée International des Arts Modestes. Visitors can also catch the pulse of the contemporary scene at MO.CO., a true artistic ecosystem in the heart of Montpellier, and at Mécènes du Sud, a consistently forward-looking exhibition space tucked away in a small street in the city centre.

Musée d’art moderne de Céret - Céret
Mimosa - Hippolyte Hentgen

Dedicated to the duo Hippolyte Hentgen, the exhibition brings together nearly one hundred works — paintings, installations, drawings, collages, sculptures and videos — offering a broad overview of eighteen years of artistic production. The exhibition opens with several murals created in situ, spread across the museum’s walls and set in dialogue with a group of drawings. Presented in series, the works form a rich, vibrant universe in which images move freely from one medium to another. Titled Mimosa, the exhibition pays tribute to the natural surroundings of Céret and to the bright yellow of the mimosa tree in winter. Several works were created especially for this occasion.

Based in Paris, Hippolyte Hentgen is the duo formed by two French artists, Gaëlle Hippolyte (born in 1977 in Perpignan) and Lina Hentgen (born in 1980 in Clermont-Ferrand). Their work weaves together visual codes drawn from art history, comics, press illustration, animation and popular imagery, giving rise to a composite, protean and distinctive visual language.

CACN – Centre d’Art Contemporain de Nîmes - Nîmes
The hour of wolf and sheep, Melika Sadeghzadeh

The exhibition presents recent works by Melika Sadeghzadeh, some of which evoke a house that is constantly changing and impossible to return to. You can observe several attempts to rebuild things, to activate memories, to account for what can no longer be seen. Conversely, some works resist the gaze: opaque, they contain the collective traumas we have got used to living with. Vision is blurred, unable to remember precisely or to move forward, in the twilight zone.

Carré d’Art - Nîmes
Dissonances à géométries variables, Tursic & Mille

Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille explore the endless possibilities of painting. Between abstraction and figuration, the duo tackles landscapes, portraits and still lifes. Their subjects are drawn from the history of art, cinema, the internet or magazines, opening up a multitude of interpretations.

Crac Occitanie - Sète
Plastic Newspaper, Lucy McKenzie

For her first solo exhibition in France, the Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie (born in 1977) revisits the major themes that have shaped her work over the past five years: statuary, fashion and the art of display windows, feminist critiques of power and elites, craftsmanship, leisure, and mass media.

The exhibition brings together a large body of paintings, sculptures, posters, trompe-l’œil works, stage sets, and garments. It explores the formal and cultural inventions that have helped transform everyday life into a permanent spectacle—much like painted panoramas, spaces of art, science, and entertainment where playful experience merges with the massification of the gaze.

Mrac Occitanie - Sérignan
Intercisio, Philippe Decrauzat

Through painting, film and installation, Philippe Decrauzat explores perception and optical phenomena, drawing on 20th-century abstraction and Op Art. An immersive experience in which patterns, light and scale disrupt the space and place the viewer at the heart of it all.

Musée-bibliothèque Pierre André Benoit - Alès
Iliazd, poet-architect of the book

Ilia Zdanevitch, known as Iliazd (1894-1975), is a major figure of the 20th-century avant-garde. A poet and visionary publisher, he left his mark on his era with his creative audacity, redefining the boundaries of typography and the dialogue between text and image. The exhibition highlights his legendary collaborations with giants of modern art, including Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró.

Musée International des Arts Modestes (MIAM) - Sète
Adrien Fregosi

A solo exhibition by Adrien Fregosi (1980–2024), who spent the last ten years in Sète, where he developed a prolific and poetic body of work that is both fragile and powerful, gentle and serious. His works stem from his drawing practice and are influenced by alternative cultures, ranging from graffiti to fanzines.