Serge Lasvignes, the president of the Centre Pompidou, is pursuing a strategy for expansion overseas and moving ahead with plans to open pop-up branches in China and Korea. “Talks are underway to establish pop-ups in Seoul and either Beijing or Shanghai,” says a centre spokesman. The Centre Pompidou’s stores may also be transferred from the northern side of Paris to the outskirts of the capital as part of the president’s masterplan.
In a recent interview with the French web publication Le Quotidien de l’Art, Lasvignes outlines his priorities, including boosting the “international presence” of the Centre Pompidou. “My aim is to start a dialogue with foreign [art] centres which will enable us to build our collections for the future. For instance, we have very few works by Mexican artists which are becoming too expensive to acquire,” he says.
A Pompidou outpost opened in March in Málaga, Spain, while the inaugural temporary exhibition at the new National Gallery Singapore, which is due to open next month, will be co-organised by the deputy director of the Centre Pompidou’s National Museum of Modern Art, Catherine David. The show, which focuses on Modern art from Asia and Europe, will open in April next year.
Lasvignes also hopes to open an “open store” located in the area around Paris, which would house the Centre Pompidou’s collections of more than 115,000 works. “On the decentralisation front, we have stores that we will have to relocate. The plan is to move them to a site in the greater Paris region and to make them partially accessible,” he says.
Lasvignes says that the future programme includes interdisciplinary exhibitions and events, with plans to open a 400 sq. m space dedicated to “young creators from across the arts spectrum”. An exhibition on the Beat Generation is due to open next summer, the post-war US movement which “lends itself perfectly to music, literature and cinema”, he says. A display dedicated to Arte Povera is also scheduled to open next year, along with an exhibition about artistic production in Beirut.
Lasvignes also promises to look beyond established art centres and focus on emerging hubs in a new biennial event called Cosmopolis. “We will look to a cultural scene far removed from the traditional art circuit, and will help a group of French artists work on a particular project,” he says. The practitioners selected will be artists-in-residence at the Centre Pompidou where they will create a site-specific piece.
