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Exhibition banner for Projet pour une revolution: Vasarely et l'architecture at Fondation Vasarely

Centre Pompidou · Beaubourg

Projet pour une revolution: Vasarely et l'architecture

Now showing12 June 2026 – 1 November 2026·€16

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.

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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.

Look for

  • 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.

Good for

  • Nerding Out
  • Out-Of-Town Guests

Skip if

You want Op Art canvases: the show itself is mostly plans, models and archive documents.

With kids

Ages 7 to 25 pay €9 and 5 to 6-year-olds €5; a family ticket costs €40.

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