The Centre Pompidou’s first “pop-up” branch outside France, in Málaga on the southern coast of Spain, will remain in place until 2025. The Paris institution and the city of Málaga last week announced their intention to extend the collaboration agreement for the 6,000 sq. m satellite space, which opened in March 2015, for another five years. The original five-year deal was signed in September 2014.
The subterranean Centre Pompidou Málaga, housed beneath a colourful glass cube on the waterfront, decorated by the French artist Daniel Buren, has drawn more than 500,000 visitors to date. Modern Utopias, the current semi-permanent exhibition of works from the Pompidou’s Modern and contemporary art collections, opened in December and will be on view until 2020. Staff in Paris and Málaga will now start to work on future programming for the space, a press statement says.
The Málaga outpost has been a pilot project and a “laboratory” for the Pompidou’s international ambitions elsewhere, according to the statement. Last summer, officials at the French museum confirmed that another branch will take up residence in a wing of Shanghai’s future 25,000 sq. m West Bund Art Museum in 2019. The renewable five-year project will show more than 20 exhibitions drawn from the Pompidou collections. Meanwhile, the preliminary programme of the Kanal Centre Pompidou, based in a 35,000 sq. m former Citroën garage in Brussels, is due to launch in May ahead of the full 2023 opening.
The city of Málaga invested around €7m to build the Pompidou outpost and pays the French museum a fee of around €1.5m a year for its brand name, curatorial expertise and collections. The Centre Pompidou Málaga has an annual budget of around €4m, according to Le Figaro.
