Exhibitions
Pascale Marthine Tayou lands in Vallauris a poetics of movement and identity
The Cameroonian artist transforms the chapel of the Pablo Picasso National Museum into a space for dialogue between cultures, travels and hybrid identities.
Vallauris, a city closely linked to ceramics and the figure of Pablo Picasso, welcomes this summer a new contemporary art proposal starring Pascale Marthine Tayou. From July 4 to November 23, 2026, the Cameroonian artist presents Poétique des worlds , a project conceived specifically for the chapel of the Pablo Picasso National Museum – La Guerre et La Paix, a space that preserves Picasso's monumental work La Guerre et La Paix .
The intervention establishes a dialogue between contemporary creation and a place full of humanistic meaning. Tayou displays a set of objects, sculptures, installations, drawings and videos that are based on the same concern: the figure of the individual in movement and their relationship with an increasingly interconnected world. The idea of a global village thus becomes one of the axes of the proposal, which also addresses the tensions linked to origins, identities and cultural expectations.
The artist, internationally recognized for a practice marked by mobility and the mixing of materials, questions established categories and cultural, geographical and social boundaries. His works do not simply seek to act as bridges between cultures, but to highlight that identities and relationships between people are social, cultural and political constructions in constant transformation.
This nomadic dimension is especially present in Tayou's career, built on travel, encounters with others and the experience of living between different contexts. His work combines spontaneity, color and heterogeneous materials to generate forms that are difficult to classify, in which hybridization becomes a tool for reflecting on contemporaneity.
The Vallauris project also extends beyond the chapel of the Picasso Museum. The invitation to Tayou also incorporates the Magnelli Museum, the Ceramics Museum, and the Espace Eden, forming a route that connects three cultural spaces in the city. In this way, the artist's presence becomes an urban intervention that invites the public to move from one space to another and discover different aspects of his production.
Among the works that exemplify this perspective is Poupées Pascale (Hybrization) (2023), a piece that combines glass and mixed media and that focuses on the processes of miscegenation and the construction of plural identities. Hybridization, in this sense, is not only a formal characteristic of her works, but a way of understanding a world defined by movement, exchanges and the coexistence of diverse realities.
With Poétique des mondes , Tayou thus proposes a contemporary reading of a space associated with one of Picasso's great symbols of peace and fraternity. His intervention expands this legacy from a perspective marked by mobility, diversity and the impossibility of reducing identities to a single origin.
The project is curated by Anne Dopffer, director of the National Museums of the 20th Century of the Alpes-Maritimes, and Grégory Couderc, Heritage Curator at the Marc Chagall National Museum in Nice.
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