A stroll through the Vertigo exhibition
For the 2025 season, the Fondation Carmignac presents a major exhibition entitled VERTIGO, on view until November 2. Conceived and designed by curator Matthieu Poirier, this exhibition offers a sensory and immersive exploration of natural phenomena and the perceptions they provoke. The title “Vertigo” - derived from the Latin vertere, meaning to turn - evokes the loss of reference points, the vertigo provoked by nature, light, wind or water, and questions the capacity of art to recreate this experience.
The exhibition unfolds in the villa's vast underground spaces, covering almost 2,000 m², as well as in the protected Mediterranean garden. The itinerary is structured around major thematic sections such as Water, Earth, Air, Infinity and sometimes the Abyss, each exploring a basic, sensory aspect of vertigo. Visitors are invited to walk barefoot to better feel the material, temperature and resonance of the site, in a staging designed to amplify the relationship between body and environment.
VERTIGO brings together some fifty works on loan from museums and institutions, from the Carmignac collection itself, and new in situ creations. The artists on show include major figures in modern and contemporary art such as Yves Klein, James Turrell, Jesús Rafael Soto, Olafur Eliasson, Hans Hartung, Anna-Eva Bergman, Helen Frankenthaler, Gerhard Richter and Frank Bowling, as well as younger artists such as Flora Moscovici and Caroline Corbasson.
The tour combines monumental paintings, kinetic sculptures, light installations and optical effects. Some works, like Turrell's immersive environments or Klein's vibrant color fields, create veritable spaces of disturbed perception. Other pieces, such as Chu Teh-Chun's rarely shown large-scale Mémoire du regard (1989), recall the evocative power of lyrical abstraction inspired by natural phenomena.
More than a simple presentation of works, the exhibition offers a total sensory experience, with natural light playing through the building's skylights, open-plan paths encouraging introspection, and alternating open and more confined spaces. The villa's minimalist, subterranean architecture enhances the effect of surprise and concentration on the works, while providing views of the surrounding countryside.
Curator Matthieu Poirier insists on the phenomenological dimension of the project: it's not just a question of seeing landscapes, but of feeling their power to disorient and transform. The scenography brings together several generations of artists and media to map a sensory geography that extends from the depths of the earth to the cosmos.
