iCentre Pompidou · Beaubourg
Marking the 50th anniversary of the Fondation Vasarely, this show explores Victor Vasarely's architectural vision through his "Centre Architectonique" building and related projects merging art and architecture.
Before you're inside, you're in the show. The façade is a march of black and white circles on anodised aluminium panels over 8 metres high, and the hexagonal cells behind it hold 42 of Vasarely's wall-sized works, lit only from above through timber pyramid domes.
This anniversary show, 50 years after the building opened in 1976, explains how it got there: the 1972 model in painted wood and plexiglas, the architects' tracing-paper plans, a sample of the domes' aluminium honeycomb, a 7-minute film. Around them are his allies: Léger's mural studies, André Bloc's plaster "habitable sculptures", Yona Friedman's Spatial City. There's even a 1975 mock-up of the Fondation's motorway sign: he designed the building, the art on its walls and the sign telling you which exit to take.
The show is plans, models and archives; the Op Art is the building around you. It's in Aix-en-Provence, not Paris, and closes on 1 November. Tickets are €16 (€12 reduced), daily until 5:30pm, with weekend guided tours at 11am for €6 extra.
The façade
Look up at the building itself: Vasarely's 'façade paintings', a procession of black and white circles on anodised aluminium panels more than 8 metres tall.
The 1972 model of the Centre architectonique
The whole building in miniature, painted wood with screenprinted plexiglas, made four years before it opened.
Hommage à Malevitch, Caracas (1954)
A photograph of his first architectural integration, a multicoloured ceramic mural 14 metres long under a covered plaza at Caracas's university city.
Yona Friedman's Spatial City
A 1958-59 study model in window glass, ceramic and wood for Friedman's utopian city, a project that was never built.
Nicolas Schöffer's Lux 10
A stainless-steel sculpture of around 1960 driven by motors on a turning platform, by a fellow member of Vasarely's art-and-architecture groups.
You want Op Art canvases: the show itself is mostly plans, models and archive documents.
Ages 7 to 25 pay €9 and 5 to 6-year-olds €5; a family ticket costs €40.