Venue: MO.CO. Panacée

Echoing the exhibition that MO.CO. dedicates to the history of the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Montpellier (MO.CO. Esba), MO.CO. Panacée offers a reflection on a true “case study”: the studio of Djamel Tatah at the École des Beaux-Arts of Paris. A professor at the institution for fifteen years, Djamel Tatah trained a generation of artists whose diversity of practices, singular career paths and rapid emergence on the national art scene continue to intrigue.

The exhibition brings together more than 120 works, either recent or specially produced for the occasion. Through painting — oscillating between figuration and abstraction — as well as drawing, sculpture, weaving and installation, the 16 artists open up inner worlds, both real and fictional, situated at the threshold between the present and the collective imagination. Their representations, marked by great formal diversity, draw inspiration from old masters as well as vernacular practices, Persian miniatures, diasporic heritages, contemporary music, and pop and post-internet culture. Often working through fragments, they explore interstices, margins and their many possibilities.

La Gauchère is a long-term research and creative project by graphic designer Marion Cachon, exploring a blind spot in design: the place given to left-handed people in everyday systems and uses. From handwriting to the most common tools, practices are largely designed by and for right-handed users, relegating left-handedness to the status of an anomaly. By embracing this imbalance, the project reveals the critical and creative potential of clumsiness, error and deviation.

The exhibition presents a left-handed calligraphy developed by the artist, posters created for the CACN, as well as trials, variations and unfinished forms, shown as an integral part of the process. It also explores the cultural and symbolic representations of the left hand, historically associated with fault or irregularity. The project is accompanied by a book co-published with the Artothèque de Caen and will later travel to La Fenêtre art centre in Montpellier as part of the GraphiMs festival.

Vivian Suter travaille quotidiennement, en plein air, dans son jardin de Panajachel au Guatemala, où elle vit depuis les années 1980. Elle laisse ses toiles au dehors et intègre dans sa peinture les facteurs externes tels que l’humidité, la lumière, la flore et la faune constituant ainsi une documentation de son environnement de vie. Sur certaines d’entre elles, des brindilles ou feuilles sont venues s’y coller, on devine des traces de pattes de chiens ou de la pluie qui a délavé la peinture.

Comme pour chaque occurrence de l’exposition Disco, précédemment dévoilée au MAAT à Lisbonne et au Palais de Tokyo à Paris, les toiles réalisées ces dernières années sont réagencées de manière libre et spontanée en fonction de l’architecture des lieux. Elles s’accumulent et se superposent sur toute la hauteur des murs, flottent dans le vide, sont suspendues à des structures ou s’amoncellent à même le sol. Près de 400 œuvres viennent dialoguer à Nîmes avec l’architecture de Norman Foster pour proposer une nouvelle immersion au regardeur dans une saturation de l’espace.

L’exposition Disco de Vivian Suter a été organisée par le MAAT, Lisbonne et le Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Elle bénéficie du soutien à la production artistique et du partenariat de ArtWorks.

A major figure in international artistic circles, Francis Picabia (1879–1953) played a key role in the history of the early 20th-century avant-gardes. In the 1910s and 1920s, shaped by his travels between New York and Barcelona, the artist developed a visual language that was as bold as it was irreverent. The exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Céret retraces his career from a fresh perspective, highlighting in particular the influence of Iberian culture on his work and on that of his contemporaries.

Bringing together nearly one hundred works by Picabia and by artists from his New York and Catalan circles — from Marcel and Suzanne Duchamp to Albert Gleizes and Juliette Roche, from Robert and Sonia Delaunay to Kees van Dongen, Marie Laurencin, Natalia Goncharova and Pablo Picasso — the exhibition benefits from the support of leading institutions in France and Spain, through exceptional loans from the Musée de l’Orangerie, the Centre Pompidou, the Prince’s Palace of Monaco, the Museo Reina Sofía, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, as well as the Picasso Museums in Paris and Barcelona.

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.

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). Through drawing, collage, sculpture and painting, the two artists explore new ways of producing images, without hierarchy between mediums. 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. Their work has been presented in numerous institutions and is held in the collections of the CNAP, the MAC VAL and several FRACs.

elipe Romero Beltrán’s artistic projects are largely grounded in the exploration of social issues, playing with the tension that new narratives can introduce into the realm of documentary photography. His practice is defined by a commitment to long-term projects that require meticulous research.

Bravo unfolds in the liminal space of the Rio Bravo (the other name for the Rio Grande), a zone of constant tension and migration where identity and geography intersect. Focusing on a 270-kilometre stretch of the river, Romero Beltrán constructs an elusive visual narrative in which the river itself becomes a silent protagonist, shaping the lives of those who come near it, though they rarely appear within the frame. Through stripped-back portraits, austere interiors and marked landscapes, Bravo captures the suspended time of migration, as its subjects wait — sometimes for years — in the shadow of an uncertain crossing.

Exhibition organised by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes.

Sébastien Arrighi explores the presence or absence of water through previously unpublished and older photographs, ranging from documentary-style shots to more intimate and poetic ones. From the Mediterranean rim (Lebanon, Spain, Greece, France) to Saudi Arabia, via a Pacific archipelago, each photograph explores how an environment shapes bodies, postures, and narratives.

Venue: MO.CO.

Since 2021, SOL ! La biennale du territoire has highlighted the vitality of contemporary creation in Occitanie. For this third edition, MO.CO. and the Musée Fabre have formed an exceptional partnership to pay tribute to a major player in Montpellier’s artistic life: the École des Beaux-Arts.

The exhibition explores a rich, long-standing and sometimes little-known history, where academic heritage, radical experimentation and international openness intertwine. It brings together works by former students, spanning from the school’s origins to 2019. The project also brings together a broad regional network, with major loans from the MRAC Occitanie in Sérignan, the Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, and the FRAC Occitanie Montpellier. Artistic partnerships have also been established with the FRAC Occitanie Montpellier, the Musée Paul Valéry in Sète, and the city’s non-profit galleries.

A showcase of the graphic design work by Huz & Bosshard, who have been designing posters, flyers, and booklets for the Mrac Occitanie for over ten years. These ephemeral items turn into artworks, revealing the collaborative nature of graphic design in the service of exhibitions and the public.

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.

Louisa Marajo (1987, Martinique) creates installations, sculptures, and photographic assemblages that explore the ecological, historical, and social tensions shaping her island of birth. In this postcolonial territory marked by hurricanes, soil pollution, and the proliferation of sargassum along Caribbean shores, the sea appears as a space of transformation and a reservoir of memory. Since 2018, the artist has explored these invasive algae as a narrative material, reflecting on how the ocean can be represented in an era of climate disruption.

La solidarité des destins, the outcome of an artist residency dedicated to professional fishing in the Mediterranean and carried out in Le Grau-du-Roi in 2025, brings together a short film, texts, images, and sculptures presented within a scenography conceived for Crac Occitanie in Sète.

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.

Through a new film in his Body Double series, Brice Dellsperger replays cult scenes from the TV show Dynasty in an immersive, multi-screen video installation. Filmed in the Frac gallery, these sequences become a burlesque choreography in which gender, cross-dressing, and pretence reveal the artificiality of media images. Echoing this, the exhibition Boucles, bricoles et miroirs, presented at the Frac Occitanie, unveils set pieces used in the artist’s films and presented as fetishes.

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.

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.