URBAN GUIDE

Painting, sculpture, installations and art objects are where it's at this holiday season. We overview the key exhibitions in the Riviera's top temples of culture.

Nouveau musée national de Monaco
Saâdane Afif : The Fountain Archives 2008-2017
Kasper Akhøj : Welcome (To The Teknival)
At Villa Sauber two artists talk to us in different ways of art history. Afif has painstakingly collected reproductions of Marcel Duchamp's The Fountain urinal; single pages torn from books and the books themselves make us consider its status and interpretations. Fascinated by Villa E-1027 at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, Akhøj is showing 59 photos that remake Eileen Gray's and Jean Badovici's originals.

* Jusqu’au 15 octobre / ** Jusqu’au 7 janvier
Monaco, 17 avenue Princesse Grace

Musée océanographique de Monaco
Borderline // Philippe Pasqua

Leading French artist Philippe Pasqua (from Grasse) both fascinates and disturbs, his taste for the monumental counterbalancing his attraction to what is most vulnerable. Brutal and unashamed, his art
puts observers in a dilemma: devour with the eye or turn the gaze away. Twelve huge artworks, seven new, question visitors on their relationship to nature, death and rebirth.
Jusqu’au 30 septembre
Monaco, avenue Saint-Martin

Villa Arson
Stop Ma Pa Ta

Stop Ma Pa Ta, meaning “my raw materials aren't yours” is the title of an ironic artwork by Benjamin Déguénon dealing with the way big companies exploit Africa's mineral resources. That's the too-topical subject on which the art centre invited 14 Beninese artists particularly concerned about the issue of materials to work. Their large pieces mix traditional and contemporary practices.
Jusqu’au 17 septembre
Nice, 20 avenue Stéphen Liégeard

Musée Magnelli
Théo Tobiasse,les lumières de l’espoir

After spending World War II closeted in a Paris apartment, Tobiasse wanted to enjoy life to the full. The Magnelli Ceramics Museum in Vallauris is showing this international artist's richly detailed work, through his key themes of women, family, musicians, exile and travel. He is celebrated too at Le Cannet's Tobiasse Chapel and in Saint-Paul-de-Vence where he had his last studio.
Jusqu’au 30 octobre
Vallauris, place de la Libération

Palais de l’Europe
Odon - Couleurs et murmures

Seeking the essence of things, Odon (the pseudonym is an anagram of "nodo", Italian for knot) questioned time and the relationship between finite and infinite. His early expressionist paintings featured complex figures surrounded by paper ribbons. These framings evolved into the works themselves, painted, sculptural, textile-like interweavings forming poetic, spiritual mazes without end.
Jusqu’au 24 septembre

Menton, 8 avenue Boyer

Espace de l’Art concret
Carlos Cruz-Diez & la donation
Albers-Honegger – Dialogues concrets

The EAC's latest project is rereadings of its collection by individual artists who confront it with their own work. The first is renowned kinetic and op artist Carlos Cruz-Diez. In his "chromatic events" the colours come and go with the light depending on the viewer's position, the lines and shapes creating an autonomous reality, an art of inherent reality.
Jusqu’au 27 mai,

Mouans-Sartoux , Château de Mouans

La Malmaison
Paul Mansouroff, ou l’immensité du plaisir de peindre

Mansouroff was a 1920s' Russian avant-garde artist, influenced by Suprematism and Constructivism and a colleague of Tatlin, Malevich and Filonov but who followed his own path. He became widely known in the 1950s after returning to pictorial painting on wood. The art centre has brought together 150 of his oils on wood and works on paper. He died in Nice in 1983.

Jusqu’au 15 octobre

Cannes, 47 La Croisette

Musée Bonnard
Bonnard / Vuillard : la collection Marcie-Rivière

Pierre Bonnard's name is often linked with that of his long-time friend and fellow Nabi, Edouard Vuillard. This summer the Le Cannet museum is showing works by both from the Zeïneb and Jean-Pierre Marcie-Rivière collection of 19th- and 20th-century art bequeathed to the Musée d’Orsay. These paintings, pastels and drawings reveal the close artistic complicity between Bonnard and Vuillard.

Jusqu’au 17 septembre

Le Cannet, 16 boulevard Sadi Carnot

Musée international de la Parfumerie
Dior, esprit de parfum
Christian Dior revivified haute couture and luxury perfumes. For Maison Dior Parfums's 70th anniversary, Grasse spotlights the timeless fragrances of a man who loved the South, flowers and gardens. Perfume bottles, gowns, furniture, paintings and photographs chronicle the avant-garde designer's world, from the first magical Miss Dior perfume in 1947 to the iconic Dior J’adore.

Jusqu’au 1^er octobre
Grasse, 2 boulevard du Jeu de Ballon

Musée National Fernand Léger
Vis-à-vis. Fernand Léger et ses amis

Nourished by fertile friendships, Fernand Léger's work evolved through contact with other artists and the early-20th century's big art movements. This comprehensive exhibition focuses on his connections with Archipenko, Arp, Calder, Czaky, Delaunay, Gris, Laurens, Le Corbusier, Lipchitz and Ozenfant. It includes a dozen paintings and sculptures loaned by the Centre Pompidou.
Jusqu’au 30 octobre
Biot, 255 chemin du Val-de-Pôme

Fondation Maeght
Eduardo Arroyo, dans le respect des traditions

A leading artist of his generation, Eduardo Arroyo paints stories of people, literature and painting as if they were novels with a beginning, a middle and an end, characters and ambiguity. The Spanish painter has used humour to forge his own well-constructed pictorial world, without ever compromising. This ironically titled exhibition comprises drawings, sculptures and paintings, some famous, others produced for the occasion.

Jusqu’au 19 novembre
Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 623 chemin des Gardettes