Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon

Created in 1984, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (Museum of Contemporary Art Lyon) moved to the Cité Internationale in December 1995 to a building specially designed by Renzo Piano. The museum boasts three floors of exhibition space and a total surface area of 2,800 m2. 

Thanks to its fully modular interior, the exhibition space can be transformed with each new artistic project. A new museum reopens for each exhibition!

The museum shows current national and international artists. Exhibitions, often co-produced with international institutions, focus on all forms of modernity: from sound (La Monte Young, Laurie Anderson, John Cage) to installation (Sophie Calle, Cai Guo Qiang); from choreography (Anna Halprin, Trisha Brown) to painting (Marc Desgrandchamps, Keith Haring, Ben, Robert Combas), and from video (Bill Viola) to performance (Jan Fabre).

Since its creation, the museum privileges a unique policy in terms of collections: it collects exhibitions, which are produced in close collaboration with the artists. There are currently more than 1,300 works of art in its collections which include a large number of monumental works: works over 1,000 m2 by artists such as Robert Morris, Abramovic and Ulay. The entirety of the museum’s collections, if displayed simultaneously, would require over 30,000 m2 of exhibition space.

Every 2 years, the museum welcomes the Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, its artistic direction being entrusted to Thierry Raspail, director of the macLYON. Furthermore, every 2 or 3 years the museum hosts a large monographic exhibition devoting all three floors of exhibition space to a single artist. Exhibitions have included Andy Warhol in 2005, Keith Haring in 2008, Ben in 2010, Robert Combas in 2012 … and Erró in 2014!