To get to France’s newest contemporary art center, the journey is part of the experience. To reach Île Seguin in Boulogne-Billancourt, in the western suburbs of Paris, you must first go to Pont de Sèvres, the final stop of Métro Line 9, and then either take a 15-minute walk or a five-minute bus ride. It is worth the trek: Crossing onto the island means leaving the dense urban fabric behind for a site surrounded by water, with views toward the banks of the Seine and the hills of Meudon.
This is where Le Large has found its place. The art center is part of Pointe des Arts, a €450 ($504.5 million) cultural development that also includes a cinema, a hotel, and other amenities. Its construction marks another chapter in the transformation of an island whose identity has long been tied to industrial production. For much of the 20th century, Renault’s factory occupied the site, employing thousands of workers and sending cars out by road and river.
The center’s name intentionally evokes both scale and possibility. Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning RCR Arquitectes, the building has a distinctive geometry, its footprint increasing from 5,382 square feet at the base to 16,146 square feet on the fifth floor. Its warm, copper-colored anodized-aluminum façade is composed of diamond-shaped elements arranged like overlapping scales, a nod to the double entendre embedded in the institution’s name. In French, prendre le large means to head out to sea.
“The expression resonates with the island setting and its relationship to the water. It conveys the possibility of escape, departure, and discovery,” director Paula Aisemberg told ARTnews in an on-site interview ahead of its opening.
With an annual operating budget estimated at €5 million ($5.6 million), Le Large will vary how it uses its 26,910 square feet in exhibition space, oscillating between a single exhibition that takes over the entire museum, as its opening show does, or having “several shows running simultaneously, one on the fifth floor, another across the sixth and seventh floors. That will be the case for our second season,” Aisemberg said.
Le Large’s ambition is to attract the broadest possible audience, imagining what lies beyond art itself. The center was designed to be a gathering space as much as an exhibition venue, and around 40 percent of its public-facing spaces are free to enter. The first floor encourages visitors to spend time in the building, where they can take in a few works from the temporary exhibitions but mostly luxuriate in the sundrenched lobby’s ample seating areas for extended conversations. Nearby, a bookshop and concept store sit alongside a flight of stairs that doubles as an amphitheater-like seating area.
This multipurpose staircase leads to a mezzanine, from which escalators lead directly to the fifth floor. There, before visitors can reach the exhibition galleries, they will find two spaces by designer Constance Guisset: Extra Large, an 80-seat coffee shop serving seasonal food and panoramic views, and Le Petit Atelier, a dedicated section for kids aged six to ten who can participate in free workshops.
To support its ambitions, Le Large operates on a hybrid model, combining a nonprofit association that has an endowment fund and a commercial entity responsible for venue rentals and private events. The association, chaired by collector Laurent Dumas, manages all of Pointe des Arts on Île Seguin, with a mission to promote French artistic creation. Its main patron is the Emerige Endowment Fund, the philanthropic arm of Dumas’s company, Emerige. Le Large is the latest in its contemporary art–focused initiatives, which include a grant for emerging artists and a commissioning program called 1 immeuble, 1 oeuvre (1 Building, 1 Artwork).
Dumas’s Pointe des Arts will almost certainly draw comparisons to Paris’s two other collector-founded private museums: the Fondation Louis Vuitton (by Bernard Arnault) and the Bourse de Commerce (by François Pinault). Architecturally, the Fondation Louis Vuitton and Le Large are similar, both being purpose-built cultural projects, while the Bourse de Commerce transforms a historic building through contemporary interventions by Tadao Ando and heritage specialists. Curatorially, the Fondation Louis Vuitton presents major retrospectives and international exhibitions, positioning itself as an important venue for new scholarship on well-known artists. The Bourse de Commerce is more directly anchored in Pinault’s collection, which informs its thematic exhibitions and artist-focused presentations. While its opening exhibition presents a dialogue between the Renault art collection and contemporary artists, Le Large’s longer-term curatorial direction remains to be established.
Rather than building a permanent collection or being a permanent home to Dumas’s own holdings, Le Large will focus on presenting on a changing program of temporary exhibitions. The inaugural show, titled “Moteur Imaginaire” (Imaginary Engine), pulls out all the stops, with one of today’s most closely watched curators attached: Cecilia Alemani, director and chief curator of High Line Art in New York and the curator of the 2022 Venice Biennale. “[The display] follows the car on an imaginary journey, from the factory floor to the assembly line, out into the world as an object of desire, and finally into the algorithm,” she told ARTnews. “That metamorphosis, from mechanism to living organism, is what drives the whole exhibition.”
Drawing on Renault’s industrial history, “Moteur Imaginaire” brings together more than 100 works by 55 artists from 23 countries, dating from the 1930s to the present. Renault has a history of commissioning artists via its Art, Research and Industry program, which invited artists into the car maker’s factories. Jean Dubuffet, Arman, Jean Tinguely, and Victor Vasarely were among those who participated. Their works are some of the 50 pieces from the Renault collection, which are complemented by historical photographs and archival material documenting the factory and its workers to connect the exhibition to the island’s former life. “We felt it was essential to acknowledge that history,” said Aisemberg.
The exhibition layout, conceived by French designer Pascal Rodriguez, unfolds across four successive spaces, separated by partition walls pierced by large circular openings at their centers. Aligned along a single axis, these apertures create a perspective that evokes the assembly-line logic of the automotive industry. “You feel as though you’re inside a machine, a car park, a tunnel, or perhaps inside an engine cylinder,” Aisemberg explained.
Added Alemani, “For almost a century, the Île Seguin was home to the Renault factory, a fortress of production that turned out some 30 million cars: a machine for making machines. I wanted the exhibition to work the same way, as an assembly line for machines and for ideas.”
At each opening, Alemani has positioned a car. The first installation is an 1898 Renault automobile transformed by Ghanaian artist Paa Joe Junior into a painted wooden palanquin. (It is part of Laurent Dumas’s collection.) Next comes Arman’s intervention on a life-size wooden model of a Renault 10, originally made by Renault engineers. Invited into the factory, the French artist cut it into fragments, which he arranged in Plexiglas boxes.
Also included in Dumas’s collection is Mohamed El Khatib’s Renault 12. Loaded with suitcases, documents, and cassette tapes, it recounts the experiences of immigrant families who drove from France to the Maghreb for summer holidays from the 1970s to the ’90s. Bertrand Lavier’s contribution is a Formula One Renault, repainted with the thick, dynamic brushstrokes that have been characteristic of his work since the 1980s.
For her first exhibition in France, Alemani explained that it was important to focus on French artists; nearly half of those included live in France. “Curating it was a wonderful opportunity to get to know the French art scene more closely,” she said, noting that she was able to work with artists whose careers she had followed for years, like Sara Sadik, Randa Maroufi, and Mohamed Bourouissa, as well as ones who were new to her, such as Valentin Ranger, Romuald Jandolo, and Bertille Bak.
Along the way, several artists also found a personal tie to Renault. “Johanna Benaïnous learned that her grandfather had worked on the island,” Alemani said. “I met a generation that treats history as living matter. They went into the archives, sat with former workers, and came back with pieces that are urgent, tender, and very much their own.”
“Moteur Imaginaire” also features 17 newly commissioned pieces, like Clément Cogitore’s film, Untitled (2026), which revisits the 1947 Renault factory strike through a nearly motionless scene of a woman knitting beside a stationary assembly line. Inspired by documentary footage, the work draws attention to a quieter, often overlooked dimension of labor activism. As the light gradually fades, the scene conveys both the workers’ determination and the suspension of industrial activity.
Cogitore’s film finds a parallel in a tapestry by Zhenya Machneva depicting the engine of her grandfather’s Renault Kangoo. “Woven on a manual loom, the work brings personal memory into dialogue with industrial history,” Aisemberg said. “Its painstaking technique offers a deliberate contrast to the speed and efficiency of mechanized production.”
Works like these are just one of the many surprises Alemani hopes visitors will find when they visit Île Seguin. “Opening a new institution is always rare, and doing it on an island so charged with memory is a real privilege,” she said. :The Renault factory was dismantled long ago, and today a brand-new building rises in its place, open to everyone. Le Large gives this extraordinary site back to the public, and ‘Moteur Imaginaire’ brings its stories back to life.”