As part of the Brazil-France 2025 Season, the Palais-Royal in Paris is hosting works by three contemporary Brazilian sculptors in an open-air exhibition combining contemporary art and historical heritage, from September 16 to October 26, 2025.
As part of the Brazil-France 2025 Season, the Domaine national du Palais-Royal becomes the setting for an unprecedented dialogue between contemporary Brazilian sculpture and classical French architecture. From September 16 to October 26, 2025, artists José Bechara, José Resende and Raul Maurão take over the gardens of the Palais-Royal with three installations designed specifically for this historic setting in the heart of Paris.
As you stroll under the arcades or through the lime-tree-lined alleys, you’ll come across these sculptures, which seem to make matter vibrate to the rhythm of a reflection on space, weight and balance. This open-air exhibition, accessible to all, is supported by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux, inviting you to enjoy a sensitive experience, between tension and contemplation, in a place steeped in history and open to contemporary creation.
An artistic experience between balance and confrontation
José Bechara, known for his sculptures of industrial and oxidized materials, deploys a work that questions the memory of place, between corrosion and permanence. José Resende, a master of static tension, presents an installation in which raw materials seem suspended, playing with the garden’s perspectives. Quan proposes a kinetic sculpture, capable of moving under the effect of the wind or the passage of visitors, installed like a breath of fresh air in the heart of French classicism.
Each intervention is part of a reflection on the place of art in public space, its capacity to disrupt the established order, to create zones of friction between past and present. It’s not just an artistic stroll: it’s an encounter with works designed to collide, merge or enter into tension with the setting in which they are displayed.
An exhibition for the curious and art-lovers alike
If you’re curious about contemporary Latin American sculpture, if you like to wander around Paris in search of art in unexpected places, this exhibition may well captivate you. It will appeal to lovers of contemporary art, to strollers sensitive to the interplay of materials and light, to families in search of cultural discovery, but also to architecture enthusiasts who will see here a rich dialogue between the built and the ephemeral.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for an interactive, tactile or educational exhibition in the classical sense of the term, or if you’re expecting figurative, immediately legible works, the experience may not meet your expectations. Here, everything hinges on personal interpretation, on a slow gaze, on a physical relationship with the sculpture.
A crossing between two worlds
Beneath the Parisian sky, between Buren’s columns and the Palais-Royal‘s elaborate railings, this temporary installation offers a link between France and Brazil, between stone and steel, between frozen history and thought in motion. The three works chosen were conceived as responses to the spirit of the place: they do not impose themselves, but infiltrate the space, like a foreign voice seeking to dialogue without breaking.
The Brazil-France 2025 Season acts as a fertile framework for these resonances to emerge: by taking up residence in one of Paris’s most emblematic heritage sites, Brazilian artists propose a re-reading of the space, at the crossroads of their worlds and the site’s history.
A cultural outing in the heart of Paris
Accessible free of charge, this open-air exhibition is ideal for an outing on your own, as a couple or with friends, at lunchtime or at the end of the day, for a breath of fresh air in the hustle and bustle of Paris. The works change appearance according to light, weather and movement, making each visit unique.
It’s also a perfect pretext for rediscovering the Palais-Royal, often forgotten in favor of other monuments, and immersing yourself in an international open-air artistic encounter, where sculptural gesture becomes language, and contemporary art settles in the heart of heritage to better reveal it.
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