Starting on June 22, 2024, Adrien Vescovi is invited to inaugurate the antechamber space and to engage the rooms of the exhibition «Alchemy of the Encounter.» He will deploy installations whose activation he has rethought to create a dialogue with the works of the other invited artists.

From 2001 to 2024, gb agency was an exhibition space, a private gallery, an inspiration for many, a breath. All at once, just like the many roles played by its founders, art historians and curators Nathalie Boutin and Solène Guillier, who have turned their lives into an adventure to be invented with artists, and to be shared.With the polyphony of…

The result of a collaboration between Lorraine de Sagazan and Anouk Maugein, "Monte di Pietà" lays bare the injustice and pain it inflicts. The director and scenographer have collected around two hundred objects for the occasion: these items are linked to traumatic memories of violence or crimes, yet their owners could not bring themselves to…

The Collection Lambert in Avignon and POUSH have teamed up to create an exhibition in the town center, showcasing the works of around forty resident artists from this vibrant incubator in Greater Paris.

But the painting is always there to let us know where we are.

On the occasion of the exhibition born from the project “our museum”, the Collection Lambert exhibits Thomas Hirschhorn's work, “Sas de contamination”, created especially for its inauguration in 2000 and never shown again for 22 years.

"Delfunland is an imaginary utopian city, celebrating love and dolphins.Perfect balance reigned. The magic fountain flowed freely and tourists flocked to make their love last forever. But then its emblema flower, the Delphinium, renowned as much for its incomparable beauty as for its toxicity, took over the city, proliferating to the point of…

From July 2023, the Collection Lambert devotes the entire two floors of the Hôtel de Montfaucon to the Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou. A close friend of the Avignon institution for nearly 10 years, he participated in the major exhibition within the former Sainte-Anne prison, La disparition des lucioles (2014), where his crystal dolls…

Internationally renowned for her photographs of artworks taken in their context of exhibition, the American artist Louise Lawler has taken a central place in the history of Yvon Lambert’s gallery and then within the Avignon institution that houses the collection. For the first time in its history, the Collection Lambert is exhibiting all 21…

The artist’s presence in the exhibition spaces of the Collection Lambert is part of the Ruinart Carte Blanche, hosted by the Avignon institution for the fourth year running. She succeeds Vik Muniz, David Shrigley and Jeppe Hein.

In my opinion, the interesting things happen when you’re not thinking about the future, independently of any historical calculation.

The exhibition conceived by Reeve Schumacher as part of the Rendez-vous, Sous-sol program resembles a mystical experience where a memory of the cosmos seems to be told. The imagination of the Origins of a world that we discover here makes hallucinated visions of landscapes collide, whose outlines take shape through the relics gleaned by the artist.

What is a museum? What would your ideal museum be? These are some of questions that our new curators asked themselves in an artistic and political gesture, in order to imagine new rules for art.

In 1974, Yvon Lambert held an exhibition of Dan Flavin’s work in his Paris gallery on the rue de  l’Échaudé, in collaboration with the artist. The show quite naturally led to a cycle of  exhibitions of new American and European avant-garde artists, placing Yvon Lambert at the forefront among those championing contemporary artists. From…

In the exhibition developed by the artist for the Collection Lambert, the figures and shapes create suspended narratives where the bodies – their shadows? – placed side by side, embraced or languid, invent storylines invading the rooms of the 18th-century mansion just like the ghosts of our past or future lives. 

Born in Afghanistan in 1989, Kubra Khademi has developed a multidisciplinary body of work whose aesthetic draws as much upon medieval Persian poetry and iconography as it does upon the most contemporary of current art practices, abolishing spatiotemporal boundaries with extraordinary joyous acuity.

After Theo Mercier, Stéphanie Brossard, and Quentin Lefranc, Dana-Fiona Armour is taking over the spaces of the Rendez-vous, Sous-sol program, dedicated to artistic research and emerging practices.  

“How to show, without betrayal, the simple things drawn between dusk and sky?”

Through this sentence uttered at the beginning of the film Matrix[1], heavily influenced by Jean Baudrillard’s thought – “The simulacrum is true” –, Morpheus invites Neo to become aware of the reality of a world he had only detected so far the faked representation, created from scratch by the Matrix.

With Maison Ruinart great support.

I am on this line leading me to the Absolute, a highly intriguing question, sometimes even worrying. 

Following Théo Mercier and Stéphanie Brossard, Quentin Lefranc invests the programme Rendez-vous, sous-sol and the rooms dedicated to it. As part of his research residency at the Collection Lambert, the artist has produced a series of unprecedented works where the brutal dimension of radical and strict architectural forms transforms according to…

In 1970, Yvon Lambert organised the first solo exhibition by Niele Toroni in a gallery. The opening was announced by sending an invitation card including the dates of the event, the name and address of the gallery as well as a description of what appeared to be the work showcased and for public viewing: Empreintes de pinceau n° 50 à intervalles…

 “Only that which was at first able to conceal itself appears”

The desire begins with the demand to live not as an object but as a subject of history – to live as if something actually depended on one’s actions – and that demand opens onto a free street. 

Stéphanie Brossard’s exhibition presented at the Collection Lambert as part of the RENDEZ-VOUS, Inside the Basement program forms the second instalment of her project titled L’intraitable beauté de nos vies sauvages #2 (Wild is the Wind), initiated in 2020 at the FRAC Réunion. It is envisaged as a narrative, both real and imagined, of a…

Yvon Lambert: “[My first meeting with Daniel Buren in 1968] was very powerful. At the time I was really dazzled by [his] intelligence. I bought my first works of his as early as 1969. We organised several exhibitions, impossible to sell, of course. […] We debated a lot, together with Michel Claura and René Denizot, but there were not that…

For forty years now, Nathalie Du Pasquier has been producing a protean work through which she deconstructs with stupendous poetry the boundaries between form and functionality, abstraction and realism, design and art.

Playground is understood as an experimental and game programme applied to the different ways to consider the exhibition of a collection. With reference to some radical practices of the exhibition in the 1980s, we are exploring the idea that new aesthetic relationships and new visions could arise from the arbitrariness of unusual - sometimes absurd…

The invisible dominates us with as much force or more than what is visible.

An exhibition…

After a first appearance at the Collection Lambert during the 2020 edition of the Festival Viva Villa! Mimosa Echard returns to Avignon in the summer of 2021 for a solo show. She will take over the 600 square metres of the first floor of the Hotel de Montfaucon for a brand-new site-specific installation.

Yan Pei-Ming’s dual exhibition at the Collection Lambert and in the Grand Chapel of the Palais des Papes follows in a long tradition of exhibitions in the pontifical palace. In recent years Yan Pei-Ming has developed several projects in close association with emblematic sites, at the Villa Médicis, the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée…

The works presented in this second exhibition of the Playgroundprogram, dedicated to artwork held in the Collection Lambert, have one thing in common: they were created in 1988. Though the choice of this particular date might be arbitrary, it raises a series of issues. Some of which are connected to the creation of an art collection – in a…

Jérôme Taub produced this series of photographs during a visual journey into the heart of contemporary America. Imagined as an anti-roadtrip, crossing the US from one ocean to another taking only the Interstate highways, Jérôme Taub develops a polymorphous vision that references documentary aesthetics, conceptual photography, or avant-garde…

Like most Californians, I come from someplace else and was gathered to the purpose of California like a metal-eating flower gathers the sunshine, the rain, and then to the freeway beckons its petals and lets the cars drive in, millions of cars into but a single flower, the scent choked with congestion and room for millions more.

As part of the program conceived by Stéphane Ibars, La Collection mise à nu par ses artistes, même, Loris Gréaud was invited to create an exhibition of a selection of works from the Collection Lambert in the space of his choice. As an expression of the professional, friendly and complicit relationship that has bound them for nearly twenty…

The ¡ Viva Villa ! festival was created for the Casa de Velàzquez, the Villa Kujoyama and the Académie de France in Rome - Villa Médicis, it has its origin in a common desire to create a regular meeting place with the French public, bringing together artists invited in residence to these three institutions in Madrid, Kyoto and Rome.

Yvon Lambert’s collection was put together as a direct result of the unique and personal vision of an individual driven by his love for the art and artists of his time and his ambition to promote their work. The relationships he has built up with the artists and acquired works (purchases, gifts, etc) are the fruit of a shared passion, an…

The museum continues its series of presentations of the Collection Lambert, exploring, in a broad panorama of sensibilities, the singularity of this unique collection of artworks assembled with the discernment of a key figure in the art of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.

182 works - 142 artists - 77 collectors

Edition 2019 - The end of Forests *Casa De Velázquez / Villa Kujoyama / Villa Médicis

The exhibition presented at the Collection Lambert returns to the sources of the raw energy in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting, questioning the uniqueness of his art, as visceral as it is self-aware, that quickly surpasses its own specificities, and the dazzling talent that quickly surpasses its own specificities, and the dazzling talent of a…

Presented at the Collection Lambert in the exhibition “Rêvez #2” in 2018, Miryam Haddad was selected in 2019 to create the poster for the 73rd edition of the Festival d’Avignon. The Collection Lambert is setting aside two rooms in its permanent collection space to present a series of her recent works.

As part of Grand Arles Express (satellite program of the Rencontres d’Arles), with which the Collection Lambert has partnered since its creation in 2016, the famous Brazilian artist Vik Muniz returns to Avignon eight years after his major solo exhibition to present a series of works for the first time in Europe.

Alongside Nirvana (performance included in the Sélection suisse en Avignon from 10 to 20 July), the Collection Lambert has invited A Normal Working Day to occupy its various basement spaces. Blending the extravagant sensuality of Delgado Fuchs with the poetic precision of the electromechanical installations of Zimoun, "Various Days" locates being…

In 2019, the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design Marseille-Méditerranée, and the École Supérieure d’Art in Avignon are privileged partners in this artistic adventure, part of the Lambert Collection presentation of its works, as well as the exhibition devoted to Francesco…

“So long as we are in this place we shall not be free from her; it is as if our thoughts must be forever stained by some of her own dark illumination – the preoccupation of a stone woman inherited from a past whose greatest hopes and ideals fell to ruins. Behind and through her the whole idea of Greece glows sadly, like some broken capital,…

In 2019, the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design Marseille-Méditerranée, and the École Supérieure d’Art in Avignon are privileged partners in this artistic adventure, part of the Lambert Collection presentation of its works, as well as the exhibition devoted to Francesco…

“An Art of our Time#1” is a wide-ranging sensory presentation of the collection assembled by a key figure in the art world. The exhibition explores the artistic revolutions spawned in the 1960s and ‘70s in the United States and Europe, of which Yvon Lambert was one of the first and most ardent champions, and shows how these new ways of…

For the third successive year the Collection Lambert is joining forces with Grand Arles Express (Rencontres d’Arles) to present the work of Swiss artist Christian Lutz in Avignon.

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) is currently recognized internationally as one of the great artists of the 20th and early 21st centuries. His work established a link between the European pioneers of modernity and the American avant-garde movements of the second half of the 20th century.

“Otherwise, all I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed, inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking.” WG Sebald, Austerlitz

Since the opening of the Collection Lambert almost twenty years ago, artists have followed in each other’s footsteps and paid tribute to the papal city: Cy Twombly and his famous “Temps retrouvé” Pure Consciousness (Avignon) by On Kawara created in Jean-Henri Fabre’s little primary school; Francesco Vezzoli’s reinterpretation of the…

“I try to make my painting experience a shared experience, one vision that meets another. Maybe this is the beauty of art: to succeed in doing something which is accessible to someone else.” Djamel Tatah

Since 2016 the Collection Lambert has been curating a unique project called ‘Rêvez!’ that is now part of the museum’s annual artistic programme to support young, newly graduated artists. If the first show paid homage to the seven art schools from the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, this second show gives a free hand to two other…

‘‘He was the first truly public artist, in the fullest sense of the word, his art and his life changed our conceptions of art and life in the 20th century.’’ Andy Warhol

While exhibitions have already revealed some of the major works collected by clothes designer agnès b. for over thirty years, the idea of carrying out her multi-faceted portrait project was never conceived on this scale. Both designer, and director of a film selected at the Venice Mostra, My name is Hmmmm, intimately linked with the world of…

In 2017, the Centre Pompidou is celebrating its 40th anniversary throughout France. To share the celebration with a wider audience, it will be presenting a completely new programme of exhibitions, outstanding loans and various events throughout the year. Exhibitions, shows, concerts and meetings will be staged in 40 French cities in partnership…

Leila Alaoui is a French-Moroccan photographer and video artist born in 1982 and died in January 2016 during terrorist attacks in Ouagadougou.

Last summer, the exhibitions at the museum allowed us to reconnect with the network of our activities and those of the École Supérieure d’Art d’Avignon, whether in management or in preventive conservation. Students, with their enthusiasm and commitment, made us want to create a totally new exhibition called ‘‘Rêvez!’’ The title…

‘‘For me, a canvas can be influenced by naïve African advertising agents, by an illustration in a primary schoolbook, by a dash of Picasso or Miró, or again by drawings like comics, plus phony Arabic script, raw painting, very Dubuffet or Cobra. Like Jules Verne, without leaving my room, I’ve been to Timbuktu.’’ Robert Combas

In the early eighties, in France as well as throughout Europe and the United States, the return of figurative painting is a jubilant break after two decades of very intellectualized art by the artists of Minimal and Conceptual Art.Yvon Lambert, who had made himself known defending these radical movements, presented this new generation, which…

The works of Chardin, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Degas, Vuillard, Picasso, Modigliani, Man Ray and the great masters ofpainting usually exhibited in the Musée Angladon - Collection Jacques Doucet invest the contemporary spaces of the Collection Lambert. The first three rooms of the Hotel de Caumont aredevoted to these works, reconnecting with one of the…

Exhibition inspired by the creation of To the heart choreography Thierry Thieû Niang scenography Claude Lévêque.Performance presented as part of the 70e Festival d’Avignon.

The Fondation Carmignac launched the Carmignac photojournalism Award in 2009 with the aim of supporting and celebrating photojournalism. This unique award funds a photographer to visit areas of the world at the centre of geostrategic conflicts, where human rights and freedom of speech are often violated.For its 6th edition, the photographer…

“When Rabin was shot, on the 4th of November 1995, I felt that a page of Israeli history had been turned. I always felt that this particular part of the world is... like a volcano. On a world scale, it’s not the biggest conflict: in the last two years more people have been killed in Syria than in one hundred years of the Israeli-Palestinian…

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”The Gospel According to St. Luke XXIII: 34

Andres Serrano was born in New York, 1950, of Honduran and Haitian parentage. His photographs have been shown in some of the world’s most prestigious museums, over the last 30 years. Yvon Lambert was one of the first French art collectors to show an interest in his work and reveal the artist’s strong ties to European culture and ancient art.…

« From Warhol to Basquiat » offers a journey in the core of Yvon Lambert’s collection, where those two huge tutelary figures of contemporary art stand for themes selected in this new exhibition : painting in all kind of forms, the image, representation as a modern icon, instant as a vision of death confronted to the most minimal practices…

The exhibition, entitled “Patrice Chéreau, An Imaginary Museum – July 3 – October 15, 2015”, is the first to pay homage to this giant of theatre, opera and film who, since his death in October 2013, has become a national icon in France.

The year 2014 marks a watershed for the Collection Lambert in Avignon. Indeed, so as to offer an exceptional home to the important donation made by Yvon Lambert to the French state, comprising 556 contemporary artworks, the Collection Lambert must close its doors to the public until the summer of 2015 during the site's extension.  

The title of this exhibition goes back to the story of Pope Joan, that astonishing medieval legend who predated the Popes in Avignon. A well-educated and charismatic personality who was elected Pope, and reigned as such in the 9th century, up until the moment when it was discovered that God’s earthly representative was pregnant. The child was…

In the present day the Arab world allows itself to be seen by the rest of the world via satellite, internet and the Twitter generation, yet it used to be described to Westerners by writers and artists that carried out long and gruelling journeys that sometimes took months or even years. 

After celebrating its tenth anniversary, the Lambert Collection is entering a new phase.  During the President of the Republic’s official visit to the museum on 18 November 2011, Yvon Lambert confirmed he would donate his collection to the State for permanent conservation in Avignon. Since this date, Avignon city council and the Culture…

This Winter, the Collection Lambert in Avignon will present a double exhibition devoted to Lawrence Weiner and Vik Muniz from 11 December. In dedicating its exhibition spaces to two major artists on the international scene, the museum revives its dual presentations that have in the past allowed for the discovery of emerging artists and present the…

In 2007, Cy Twombly presented the sublime exhibition specially for Avignon. Entitled "Blooming", it featured a cycle of huge paintings on the theme of peonies and their typically Japanese poetry.

The Collection Lambert en Avignon has come a long way since it opened in 2000. Successive exhibitions have earned it widespread recognition at regional and national level in France as well as on the international scene. Over the past ten years, the museum has played host to a large number of artists of different ages and nationalities, many of…

To mark the tenth anniversary of the Collection Lambert, the City of Avignon decided to organize a major exhibition devoted to the rich and many-facetted art of Miquel Barceló, an artist who divides his time between Paris, Majorca (where he was born) and the Dogon villages of Mali. This exhibition, curated by the Collection Lambert en Avignon,…

"Untitled #1" presents paintings and drawings from the Collection Lambert en Avignon. It includes both historic items and recent acquisitions, and provides an insight into the way the collection has developed and into the identity of its home. 

Marine love, terrestrial love, celestial love: this is the trilogy of amorous feeling and aesthetic emotion that the great American artist Roni Horn invites us to explore in this huge summer retrospective occupying all the rooms of the Collection Lambert’s mansion and the main hall of the former railway depot in Arles, as part of the 'Rencontres…

This is the second part of an exhibition entitled "Le Grand Tour" (a reference to the journeys to Italy undertaken by European intellectuals from the seventeenth century onwards) which opened in spring 2008 at the Académie de France in Rome (Villa Medicis). ‘After Roma’ looks at the Collection Lambert from a new perspective.

After last summer’s flamboyant, radiant and sunny exhibition given to Avignon by Cy Twombly, with the jubilant title "Blooming, a Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things", the summer of 2008 is devoted to Scottish artist Douglas Gordon who, as a counterpoint to this explosion of joy worthy of Matisse, presents an altogether more gloomy, sombre,…

Since the Collection Lambert took up residence at the Hôtel de Caumont in Avignon in 2000, it had been our dream to exhibit at the Villa Médicis in Rome. This honourable project became a reality when Richard Peduzzi, director of the Académie de France in Rome, met the art dealer and collector Yvon Lambert. Although everyone dreams of one day…

On the contemporary art scene, Candice Breitz seems to be a symptom of our times. Representative of the Postproduction generation, her work suprises us by the radical way it makes use of new technology. Like other world famous artists who arrived at the forefront of the art world in the 1990s – Philippe Parreno, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe,…

Following on from Candice Breitz’s exhibition essentially composed of video installations and immense photographs, the idea appealed to us to present an ensemble of artworks in the succession of great spaces on the ground floor in reference to one of the fathers of Minimal art, Bruce Nauman, the Collection Lambert possesses numerous works on…

Cy Twombly is a victim on two accounts: first, because a vulgar kiss was deliberately placed on one of his paintings that forms part of the collection at our museum in Avignon. Second,  because, as the artist said with irony, his name will now always be known in France, but only as that of a man who made a white canvas that was kissed by a woman…

Cy Twombly has given the Collection Lambert a landmark exhibition. The last opportunity to see his work in France was the retrospective of works on paper at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in 2001, previously presented at the Ermitage in Saint-Petersburg. Twombly produced a whole exhibition specially for Avignon, naturally working with…

The result of a day out walking in the countryside around Aix two years before the great celebrations of the Year of Cézanne, this exhibition at the Collection Lambert is actually the continuation of a ‘first draft’ presented last autumn on the Cours Mirabeau. Last year, following a preliminary project that was deemed too ambitious for the…

The Collection Lambert presents the first ever monographic exhibition in France devoted to the work of US photographer Andres Serrano, featuring over 150 photographs, including 110 produced by the Moscow Museum of Photography.

Echoing the sixtieth edition of the Theater Festival, the Collection Lambert in Avignon offers a summer exhibition on the portrait and image of the actor entitled "Figures of the actor. Le Paradoxe du comédien ", in reference to Diderot’s famous text on the art of acting in the theater. This exhibition reinforces the festival’s desire to…

To mark the fifth anniversary of the museum, the summer show at the Collection Lambert, simply entitled "5 ans" ("5 years"), presents masterpieces from the collection. It harks back to the series of exhibitions entitled "Rendez-vous" aimed at presenting Yvon Lambert’s collection in four parts. For the museum’s fifth anniversary, visitors will…