Whether it’s a bygone Lavandou captured by the British photographer Shirley Baker in the 1970s and ’80s, the long journeys across Central Asia of MariBlanche Hannequin, the Chilean, Indian or African escapes of Françoise Nuñez, the Cuban street scenes of Agnès Varda, or the timeless portraits of Sabine Weiss taken across the globe, each of these photographers offers a visual language that blends movement and contemplation through a deeply humanist lens.

Through their work, the aim is not only to show the world, but to reveal its subtlety — quiet humour, tenderness, melancholy, joy and vital energy. These photographic journeys become bridges between distant lands and our own imagination, between intimate stories and collective memory.

Offrande d’Azur is an aerial, luminous installation where time, gravity and living matter enter into a silent dialogue, a delicate dance between mimosa and brass. Through a slow, meditative process, the artist shapes nature as a subject in its own right, revealing the beauty of the fragile and the transient.

Inspired by the Japanese concept of mono no aware (物の哀れ) — a sensitivity to impermanence and the transformation of all things — the exhibition invites contemplation of life in its fleeting nature. Each sculpture drifts gently through the air, evoking the relativity of time.

Here, Ambre Cardinal offers a poetic and sensory encounter, where light glides over metal as it would across the skin of a landscape. Offrande d’Azur becomes a tribute to the resilience of the living, a celebration of metamorphosis, and an invitation to slow down and reconnect more attentively with the world around us.

The exhibition retraces the journey of a free-spirited painter moving through a 19th century in full transformation. From foundational landscapes to springs and rivers, from the animal world to seascapes, and from portraits to biting caricatures, it reveals the full breadth of Courbet’s universe. It highlights an artist who bestowed dignity and monumentality upon workers, peasants and craftsmen. His involvement in the Paris Commune, the Vendôme Column affair and his subsequent exile in Switzerland underscore his political dimension. Through his direct, modern gaze on reality, Courbet overturned academic conventions and paved the way for artistic modernity.

In partnership with the Institut Gustave Courbet, Ornans.

The relationship between colour and abstraction, developed in the second half of the 20th century, is characterised by rivalry and conflict. Colour struggled to break through in the post-war aesthetics of abstract expression, which was typically resistant to bursts of colour. Dominant colour palettes were often dark, rarely venturing out of black, white and grey.

Nevertheless, some artists like Dewasne managed to impose a colourful vision by articulating expression through geometric configurations or by using the lyrical power inherent in colour like Mathieu, Schneider, Poliakoff, Hartung, and now, Fabienne Verdier or even like Hantaï who made colour itself the central aspect of his work. Across the Atlantic, artists vigorously claimed Matisse’s legacy by declaring colour as the essential component of their abstract work whilst reinventing painting. This is true of Shirley Jaffe and Sam Francis.

It is from this series of struggle that both vibrant and dark sensations, emotions and even dialogue arose which we could call “colour abstraction”.