From 8 May 2025 to 1 February 2027, the Centre Pompidou-Metz celebrates its 15th anniversary with one of its most ambitious exhibitions: Endless Sunday. Nearly 400 works from the Centre Pompidou enter into dialogue with 40 iconic creations by Maurizio Cattelan. A total, immersive, and unsettling journey that transforms the museum into a sensory and political labyrinth.
A major exhibition that redefines Cattelan’s place in contemporary art
With Endless Sunday, Maurizio Cattelan becomes not only one of the featured artists but also co-curator alongside Chiara Parisi, Director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz. He casts a sharp, incisive gaze on the Centre Pompidou’s collections, revealing, through unprecedented juxtapositions, the zones of tension that run through the history of modern and contemporary art.
From the entrance, visitors come face-to-face with L.O.V.E., his provocative anti-monument: a monumental raised middle finger, a symbol of defiance and anti-authority. A statement of intent. A promise: nothing here will be comfortable.
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A journey shaped like an alphabet primer: total immersion in contemporary mythologies
The exhibition adopts the form of an abecedarium, a nod to Gilles Deleuze, which allows visitors to revisit the great themes of modernity through historical works and installations by Cattelan.
Highlights include:
D – The Beginning of the War Will Remain Secret
Around Chen Zhen’s monumental Round Table and Cattelan’s spectacular Sunday, the exhibition reveals the political fractures of the contemporary world: inaccessible diplomacy, violence beneath a golden veneer, the memory of European conflicts.
H – Hatred, Friendship, Seduction, Love, Marriage
A section dedicated to the game of chess, featuring an exceptional loan: Marcel Duchamp’s chess table, presented to the public for the first time. Cattelan responds with Good Versus Evil, a board populated by porcelain figurines tinged with political satire.
N – We the Animals
The famous Felix — a giant cat skeleton — enters into dialogue with Julie Curtiss, Gloria Friedmann, and Francis Bacon, offering a powerful reflection on animality, vulnerability, and the metamorphosis of the body.
An immersive scenography that transforms the museum
Designed by Berger&Berger, the scenography transforms the Grande Nef into a circular space inspired by the museum’s hexagonal architecture. The serpent Uroboros, symbol of the infinite cycle, structures the itinerary and reinforces the theme of Sunday as a suspended, cyclical, unending moment.
Exhibitions within the exhibition — cinema entrances, a miniature gallery (Wrong Gallery) — blur the boundaries between the real, the museal, and the fictional worlds.
The exceptional return of André Breton’s Studio Wall
For the first time, André Breton’s Studio Wall leaves its Paris home to be presented in Metz. Composed of 255 objects — masks, fossils, sculptures, and personal mementos — it embodies the spirit of Surrealism and the notion of objective chance dear to Breton.
Its presence in Endless Sunday acts as a key for interpretation: a museum envisioned as a free, intuitive space, traversed by intersecting and colliding narratives.
A landmark exhibition celebrating the Centre Pompidou-Metz’s 15th anniversary
Performances, concerts, film, workshops, and talks: the museum offers four uninterrupted days of festivities from 8 to 11 May 2025. Highlights include:
• LaBOLA performances by La Ribot,
• Re-enactment of RSVP by Senga Nengudi,
• Pink & Silver Anniversary Ball orchestrated by Vinii Revlon
• Urban mini-battles, DJ sets, outdoor screenings
• A series of talks centered on the exhibition’s works
Together, these events reaffirm the Centre Pompidou-Metz’s direction: a living museum, open to transdisciplinary practices, where contemporary creation meets the public in all its forms.
A Sunday that never ends: why this exhibition is unmissable
Endless Sunday does not merely juxtapose works. It reveals what our rituals, our rest, our beliefs, and our revolts say about us.
The exhibition’s strength lies in:
• its museographic ambition: 400 works, 40 pieces by Cattelan, a total occupation of the building
• its visual power: monumental installations, immersive scenography
• its transhistorical dialogue: from Derain to Bacon, from Duchamp to Vieira da Silva
• its political depth: power, violence, cycles of time, fragility of the body
• its singular dimension: the presence of Breton’s Wall, the mise en abyme of the Wrong Gallery, curatorship entrusted to a major artist.
It is an exhibition that unsettles, disorients, amuses, and disturbs.
It is a museum reinventing itself for its 15th anniversary.
A major cultural event for 2025–2027.
See also:
Centre Pompidou-Metz 2026: the must-see exhibitions that will shape the year
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