Centre Pompidou Closes for Five Years
It’s the final chance for visitors to enjoy France’s national museum for modern art before it shuts its doors until 2030 to undergo major renovations and reconnect with the ‘original utopian vision’ of the building. Save to My Ocula
The Centre Pompidou in Paris closes this evening for five years as it prepares to undergo major renovations.
The iconic postmodern building will be revitalised in a project led by architectural firms Moreau Kusunoki (lead architects and principal designers) in association with Frida Escobedo Studio (associate designer), with AIA Life Designers, responsible for the technical renovation. Beginning in early 2026, work will include asbestos and corrosion removal, as well as environmental and accessibility improvements.
The museum will also take this opportunity to reimagine its permanent collection display and library, as well as change the overall layout, in an effort to enhance the visitor experience and ‘reconnect … with its original utopian vision’, as described in a museum statement.
The Parisian museum celebrates its finissage until 2030 with free access to its closing Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition, Nothing Could Have Prepared Us - Everything Could Have Prepared Us, which has already attracted over 200,000 attendees. Tillmans will also be signing the exhibition catalogue as part of the closing event.
For this retrospective, the German photographer was given carte blanche to use the space of the museum’s vast public information library, whose collection can now be accessed at the Lumière building in the 12th arrondissement for the renovation period.
The museum plans to exhibit more widely, both in France and internationally, during the renovation period.
Its Constellation programme launched in April with exhibitions featuring work from its collection at Le Tripostal in Lille, at the Centre Pompidou’s outpost in Metz, and at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco.
Next autumn, a new branch of the museum is set to open in nearby Massy in the southern suburbs of Paris. The Centre Pompidou Francilien will offer new permanent collection spaces for both the national modern art collection as well as work from the Musée National Picasso-Paris.
In addition to the Paris renovation and the launch of the Francilien, the next five years will see even more development for the Centre Pompidou network, with branches due to open in Brussels and Seoul in 2026, Paraná in Brazil in 2027, and Jersey City in 2030. —[O]
Editor’s Note: This article was amended on 2 October 2025 to accurately reflect the roles of the architectural firms working on the renovation project.
Main image: Exhibition view: Wolfgang Tillmans, Rien ne nous y préparait − Tout nous y préparait (Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us), Centre Pompidou, Paris (13 June–22 September 2025). Courtesy Galerie Buchholz; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; Maureen Paley, London; David Zwirner, New York. Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans.
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