The Grand Palais honors African-American artist Mickalene Thomas with All About Love: a vibrant retrospective exploring the visibility and representation of Black women and celebrating love as a force for liberation, self-affirmation, and joy.

All About Love is a monographic exhibition by American artist Mickalene Thomas (1971, New York), internationally recognized for her bold and multidimensional practice. She explores the representation of Black women in art, history, and popular culture, reinventing the classical portrait through a queer and Black feminist perspective.

The retrospective covers more than two decades of creation, combining painting, collage, photography, video, and installation. At the center of her work, love appears as a force of liberation, joy, and self-affirmation, a theme inspired by bell hooks' seminal book, All About Love: New Visions (1999).

Thomas's works pay tribute to the autonomy, beauty, and resilience of Black women. Her subjects-friends, family, lovers, and cultural icons-are depicted with confidence, sensuality, and grace, reclaiming spaces from which they have historically been excluded. The compositions, often adorned with rhinestones, invite the audience to enter worlds where pleasure becomes political and representation radical.

Thomas also engages with European art history, particularly French art history. Iconic works such as Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) and Ingres' La Grande Odalisque (1814) are reinterpreted through a contemporary lens, placing black women at the center of the narrative and transforming the reading of the classics.

All About Love invites you to discover a world of love, leisure, and liberation, where beauty, intimacy, and self-control redefine the historical view of art.

Following acclaimed exhibitions at The Broad (Los Angeles), The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), the Hayward Gallery (London), and Les Abattoirs (Toulouse), this retrospective is the most ambitious presentation of Mickalene Thomas's work in Paris to date.

Exhibition organized by the GrandPalaisRmn, the Hayward Gallery, London, and Les Abattoirs, Museum - Frac Occitanie Toulouse

Curators

Rachel Thomas, Chief Curator, Hayward Gallery
Lauriane Gricourt, Director of Les Abattoirs, Museum - Frac Occitanie Toulouse
Erin Jenoa Gilbert, Independent Curator

Scenography: Nicolas Groult and Valentina Dodi

With over 35,000 drawings, the Centre Pompidou's graphic art collection is one of the world's largest collections. For the first time, more than 300 works by 120 artists including Dubuffet, Basquiat, Delaunay, Kentridge and many others reveal, at the Grand Palais, a constantly reinvented art of drawing.

With more than 300 works by 120 artists, the exhibition offers a unique exploration of the Centre Pompidou's graphic art collection, organized around four sequences: studying, narrating, drawing, and animating. Without chronological order, the parcours is based on a sensitive approach where works succeed and respond to one another in a domino effect. A unique dive into an art that is fragile, inventive, and ever-relevant.

Coproduction between Centre Pompidou and GrandPalaisRmn

Curators

Claudine Grammont Head of Department, Graphic Arts, Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne

Anne Montfort-Tanguy Curator, Graphic Arts, Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne

Associated curators: Valérie Loth and Laetitia Pesenti, Assistant Curators, Graphic Arts, Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne

Exhibition design: Pauline Phelouzat Architect-designer

The Grand Palais invites artists Eva Jospin and Claire Tabouret to take over two galleries linked by a single entrance. On one side, Grottesco,a journey teeming with forests, caves and imaginary architectures; on the other, D'un seul souffle orbehind-the-scenes of a monumental project: the future contemporary stained glass windows of Notre-Dame de Paris.

Eva Jospin brings together more than fifteen works, some created especially for the exhibition and unveiled for the first time, others revisiting emblematic motifs from her work. The title of the exhibition, 'Grottesco', is inspired by the legend of a young Roman who accidentally fell into a cave where he discovered forgotten frescoes from the Domus Aurea. From this buried palace, resembling a cave, emerges the 'grotesque' that Eva Jospin draws upon: a style in which the vegetal, the architectural and the fantastical intertwine. The exhibition invites visitors on a journey through a world apart: promontories, cenotaphs, caves, ruins and forests follow one another, constantly transforming perception and revealing new motifs. Among the new pieces, a series of embroidered bas-reliefs catches the eye. A fusion of textiles and sculpture, these works mark a new stage in Eva Jospin's research.

The Eva Jospin, Grottesco exhibition is supported by GALLERIA CONTINUA.

In an exhibition entitled 'D'un seul souffle' (In a Single Breath), Claire Tabouret presents life-size models, sketches and preparatory work for the six stained-glass windows she created for Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Winner of the competition organised by the Ministry of Culture in association with the Simon-Marq workshop in December 2024, she reveals the behind-the-scenes story of this exceptional project. Each model reproduces a full-scale bay window from the south aisle of the cathedral. Produced using monotype, a printing technique frequently used by the artist, they are embellished with stencils for the rosettes and decorative motifs. These designs respect the neutral light of the building and create a smooth transition with Viollet le Duc's stained glass windows, while offering bright and balanced colours. Inspired by the theme of Pentecost, a symbol of unity and harmony, Claire Tabouret invites you to enter into the intimacy of her creative process and experience a rare moment: a behind-the-scenes look at an extraordinary creation.

The exhibition Claire Tabouret, D'un seul souffle (Claire Tabouret, In a Single Breath) has benefited from the generous contribution of Ms Kristin Johnson and her family.

Set design: Jean-Paul Camargo

Over time, some of the paintings depicting Étretat have acquired an iconic status and become part of the collective imaginary. The museum, in partnership with the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, will present an exhibition devoted to representations of Étretat, based on four major works held in the collections of the two institutions, all of which were painted in Étretat: two Waves by Gustave Courbet (1869-1870), and two paintings by Claude Monet, The Luncheon (1868-1869) and Rough sea, Etretat (1883). These works testify of the central role played by this village, located on the Normandy coast, in the development of new pictorial languages over the course of the 19th century. Through a selection of paintings, drawings, photographs and archives, the exhibition traces the story of the discovery of Étretat by artists, painters and writers alike, and highlights its construction as a mythical landscape, from Eugène Isabey to Henri Matisse. 

The exhibition is organised by the museum of Fine Arts of Lyon in association with the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.