Maurizio Cattelan - Endless Sunday
Centre Pompidou-Metz
8 May 2025 - 2 February 2027
In May 2025, to mark its 15th anniversary, the Centre Pompidou-Metz will fill all of its spaces—the Grande Nef, Galerie 1, the roofs of the galleries and the smallest nooks and crannies of the architecture—with hundreds of works from the collection of the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, whose building will be undergoing construction work for a period of several years.
Since it opened, the Centre Pompidou-Metz has been privileged to present numerous works from the collection of the Centre Pompidou. To celebrate this rich partnership, this exhibition will present works that are rarely exhibited and pieces that one would never suspect were in the collection, showcasing movements from the history of art in all its complexity. It will feature the wall from the studio of André Breton as well as Marcel Duchamp’s chess table which recently joined the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne.
The exhibition will explore the concept of Sunday, a multifaceted subject that has inspired multiple associations amongst the curators—brought together around the artist Maurizio Cattelan—raising social, political and aesthetic questions that are important in present-day society. It will look at, among other things, the division between leisure time and work time, private and public spaces, spirituality, light and the potential of art to imagine alternative worlds or offer melancholic meditations.
A selection of paintings, sculptures, installations and films from the collection of the Centre Pompidou will dialogue with works by Cattelan, from his earliest pieces, notably Stadium, a giant table football, to his more recent creations like Comedian and Felix. In addition, the exhibition will embrace a larger chronological field than that of the 20th and 21st centuries, through the presence of Gradiva and a group of rare manuscripts and books from the Vatican museum, showing the power of ancient mythical sources for modern and contemporary art.