Special projects
Special projects
Exhibitions specially designed for Art Monte-Carlo, presented by foundations, institutional collections, and private collections.
Peter Fend © Global Warming, 2025 | Caisson lumineux, Collection NMNM, n°2025.10.1 | Acquisition dans le cadre du programme pédagogique « Les Apprentis collectionneurs », avec le soutien de la SOGEDA, Courtesy de l’artiste et de Pinksummer Gallery
10th edition of the Apprentis collectionneurs
For its 10th edition, the Apprentis collectionneurs (Apprentice collectors) return to Art Monte-Carlo. Rescheduled to its original dates (April 28–May 1), the fair will provide a wide selection of international galleries for students specializing in the arts at the François d’Assise Nicolas Barré and Albert I high schools. Launched in 2017, this educational program raises students’ awareness of the museum’s main missions: collecting, exhibiting, conserving, studying, and transmitting heritage and contemporary creation. For the last two years of high school, they take part in a series of visits, meetings, presentations, and a cultural trip, all of which introduce them to writing about works of art, scenography, the art market, and exhibition design.
At each edition, the Apprentice Collectors, with a budget of €20,000 since 2021, have proposed works presented by galleries participating in the artmonte-carlo (2017-2020), Art Paris (2021 and 2024), Artgenève (2023), ARCOmadrid (2022 and 2025). No fewer than 30 works by 11 different artists have been acquired, constituting a significant ensemble that was exhibited in 2025 at the Villa Sauber as part of the exhibition “AGORA, la place du musée”.
This year, as part of the artmonte-carlo fair, the NMNM has been invited to organize a public event around this program and to exhibit Peter Fend’s work entitled Global Warming, acquired from the Pinksummer gallery (Genoa, Italy) at ARCOmadrid in 2025. This program is supported by SOGEDA (Société pour la Gestion des Droites d’Auteurs), Monaco, and the Prince’s Government’s Department of Education, Youth, and Sports.
Hans Josephsohn, Untitled (Ruth), 1969, credits : Kesselhaus Josephsohn Galerie Felix Lehner
Earthly Delights
Earthly Delights, a group exhibition curated by Stefano Rabolli Pansera, lies at the heart of Art Monte-Carlo’s new curated section.
The group show will notably feature works by Alvaro Barrington (Emalin), Francis Alÿs (Jan Mot), Leonora Carrington (rossogranada), Marcel Dzama (David Zwirner), Hans Josephsohn (Kesselhaus Josephsohn/Galerie Felix Lehner), Martin Kippenberger (Galerie Layr), Ed Ruscha (Studio Bruno Tonini), Giovanni Stanchi and Stefania Tejada (Maison d’Art).
Taking as its starting point Luis Buñuel’s writings on the bar as a space for solitary reflection, contemplation, and mental wandering, the exhibition considers pleasure as a condition that enables creation. Far from any notion of excess or spectacle, it is understood here as an attentive practice, grounded in repetition, precision, and the intensity of gesture. The works explore forms of intimacy and perception through modest actions – waiting, observing, drawing – which become artistic strategies. By privileging proximity and introspection, Earthly Delights highlights a relationship to the world based on detail, duration, and the patient construction of the imagination.
2025 edition
Pierre Yovanovitch © Eric Petschek
Pierre Yovanovitch, Guest of Honour at Art Monte-Carlo, presents ‘Bleu Méditerranée’, an immersive scenography blending furniture and contemporary art.
From July 7 to 9, Pierre Yovanovitch will take over a 60 m2 space to showcase a selection of his furniture in a scenography that reflects his vision of the Riviera, where he was born and has deep roots. The installation draws visitors into a colorful architectural setting where his furniture engages in dialogue with vintage pieces. Blue, the iconic color of the Mediterranean, plays a central role.
The scenography resonates with contemporary artworks selected by Marie-Sophie Eiché-Demeter, Art Advisor to Pierre Yovanovitch. This exhibition reinforces the dialogue between furniture, architecture, and artistic creation – a cornerstone of Pierre Yovanovitch’s work.
Centre Pompidou – Mezzanine vers Pole Nord © Moreau Kusunoki en association avec Frida Escobedo Studio
Metamorphosis of the Centre Pompidou 2025-2030
Curator:
Boris Hamzeian, Musée National d’Art Moderne – Service architecture, MNAM-CCI
In collaboration with:
Moreau Kusunoki
Frida Escobedo Studio
AIA Life Designers
Stand E3
Vassily KANDINSKY, Bleu du ciel, 1940, oil on canvas
100x73cm / Donation of Mrs. Nina Kandinsky in 1976 / Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle
Colors !
A selection of works by Didier Ottinger, curator of the exhibition Colors! Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou, at Grimadi Forum Monaco
In 1998, the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon devoted an exhibition to the only form of color that seemed compatible with the principles of pictorial modernism: the monochrome (Note: the title of the exhibition was: “La couleur seule, l’expérience du monochrome”).
It would take two more decades before color once again became the focus of an exhibition updating the theoretical stakes of its modern use. In 2008, MoMA in New York inaugurated Color Chart, which explored the shift that occurred around 1950, when artists began to move away from a chromaticism still rooted in their sensory experience, in favor of a “ready-made” color—borrowed from the color charts of industry, interior design, and graphic art. The scarcity of studies on modern color gives rise to a sense of suspicion, perhaps even suggests a kind of discomfort… In 1986, the neo-Situationist provocateurs grouped under the banner Présence pantchounette struck where it hurt. Their ironically titled exhibition Coquet, lumineux, meublé (“Chic, Bright, Furnished”) revealed the unspeakable, the unacknowledged “decorative” dimension of modern art—an art whose theoretical rationale, grounded in “purity” and abstract idealism, had vehemently rejected such a notion.
The exhibition Colors! Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou, curated by Didier Ottinger at the Grimaldi Forum, pays tribute to those earlier exhibitions. The hundred masterpieces from the Pompidou Center’s collection that form the core of the show offer a way to understand the iconographic, symbolic, and cultural reasons behind modern chromaticism.
Sigg Art Residency © Herve Milliard
Bloom as Gesture
With Bloom as Gesture, the Sigg Art Foundation presents a constellation of works that speak to growth — not only botanical, but personal, technological, and collective. From cast glass to generative prints, living plants to sculpted illusions, each piece explores what it means to be in bloom today: to transform, to hybridize, to evolve. Echoing our mission to nurture emerging creatives and cultivate dialogue between craft and computation, this selection captures the fragile strength of forms in transition. These are not static flowers, but unfolding processes — gestures of becoming that question how we shape beauty, memory, and identity in a world on the cusp of reinvention.
Presented artists:
Dana-Fiona Armour, Salomé Chatriot, Sougwen Chung, Léa Collet, Ben Elliot, Mamali Shafahi, Seneca.
About Sigg Art Foundation:
Sigg Art Foundation is an independent, non-profit organisation founded in 2020 by longtime art collector Pierre Sigg. Through residencies, collection, and programming, the Foundation supports the development of new ideas, fosters knowledge exchange, and builds bridges between cultures. With a particular focus on emerging creatives, Sigg Art Foundation champions artists who challenge history and artistic heritage through the lens of digital and technological innovation.
The Foundation operates under Belgian non-profit private foundations legislation and works internationally. Its artist-in-residence programme is based at a private estate in the South of France. Funding is provided through advisory and consulting services, partnerships with sponsors who share the Foundation’s core values of excellence, innovation, and collaboration, and the continued support of founder Pierre Sigg.
Booth E0