Centre Pompidou-Metz: Engaging audiences

Just like the original Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Centre Pompidou-Metz is housed in a ground-breaking architectural building. Often referred to as ‘the Chinese hat’, with its wooden lattice roof, this vast building covering 10,000 square metres aims to make art accessible to everyone.

Centre Pompidou-Metz is the only permanent Pompidou centre outside Paris. It regularly shows a whole range of artists’ work, including Picasso, Chagall and Matisse, as well as more contemporary artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Guiseppe Penone and Annette Messager. Nearly fifty years after her last retrospective in France and until September, the Centre honours Suzanne Valadon in an ambitious monograph, conceived as the visual narrative of a romantic artist’s life. Discover all the lives of this circus artist, model and resolutely modern artist at the heart of a century in motion, through masterpieces that are not to be missed!

In June this year, an incredible exhibition is being offered to the public: Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of the Serpentine Gallery in London, explores how contemporary artists have engaged with video games. Alongside this, the Scandinavian duo Elmgreen and Dragset will be transforming large areas within the Centre Pompidou-Metz to create artificial environments as part of an exciting new art installation. Commenting on the forthcoming shows, head of audiences, Elsa De Smet, says: “We’re really thrilled about these exhibitions. It’s a great example of how we work with our partners to create original thought-provoking art in a physical setting.”

A core mission of the Centre is to be open and accessible to a wide range of audiences, particularly young people, as can be seen in the doudou programme for children from 18 months to three years old. Virtual exhibitions are also shared with schools and institutions, as well as prisons, the disabled and the elderly. It opened an atelier called La Capsule, where families are invited to express their creativity under the guidance of artists. De Smet: “It’s really important that the Centre is attractive to everyone. It’s great that we have people visiting us from all over Europe, but we also want to be a core part of the community.”

Centre Pompidou-Metz is just that. Situated in a new district of Metz and a great addition to the area, the Centre is next to beautiful gardens for visitors to enjoy. It also offers a cinema and a new hotel designed by Philippe Starck. Centre Pompidou-Metz is a 15-minute walk from the centre of Metz and is very close to the city’s train station, with direct trains from Paris, Luxembourg, Strasbourg and Brussels.

Web: http://www.centrepompidou-metz.fr