The Hanwha Culture Foundation announced Wednesday that Centre Pompidou Hanwha, established through a partnership with France's Centre Pompidou, will open on June 4 at the 63 Building in Yeouido, Seoul. The museum has been undergoing interior finishing and opening preparations since the building's construction was completed in late February.
The inaugural exhibition, "The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision," opening June 4, focuses on Cubism, the art movement that marked a turning point in 20th-century art. The exhibition carries symbolic significance, signaling Centre Pompidou Hanwha's "new beginning" through Cubism, which opened new perspectives in modern art. Notably, the show is not a simple traveling exhibition of the Pompidou collection but was curated jointly by Korean and French curators. It is a large-scale exhibition spanning approximately 3,300 square meters across two combined gallery spaces.
The exhibition features representative Cubist artists including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, and Sonia & Robert Delaunay, as well as artists rarely seen in Korea such as Albert Gleizes, Amédée Ozenfant, and Natalia Goncharova. Approximately 90 paintings and sculptures by some 40 artists are presented across eight sections, with many works never before shown in Korea. A large ballet stage curtain produced by Pablo Picasso, never previously introduced in Korea, is expected to draw particular attention as it is unveiled for the first time.
According to the foundation, Centre Pompidou is France's national museum of modern and contemporary art and a multidisciplinary cultural center, renowned for its vast collection featuring masterworks of modernism and contemporary art by artists including Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, and Sonia Delaunay.
Centre Pompidou Hanwha plans to hold two exhibitions per year based on the Pompidou's world-class collection over the next four years. In addition to Pompidou collection exhibitions, the museum will present two to three self-curated exhibitions annually focusing on Korean and global contemporary art, continuing programs that connect international art-historical currents and contemporary discourse within Korea's cultural context.
