Show at the Centre Pompidou: spectacular farewell fireworks by Cai Guo-Qiang

Looking for a great deal in the heart of Paris? The Centre Pompidou is continuing its departure program, piling up exceptional events before it closes for five years of renovation. On October 22, 2025, at 5:30 p.m., during Contemporary Art Week and theArt Basel Paris opening at the Grand Palais, artist Cai Guo-Qiang will transform the building's iconic façade into a monumental tableau for a fireworks display in broad daylight.

Called Le Dernier Carnaval, this free 20-minute pyrotechnic performance in the Beaubourg piazza can be booked online, and will of course be visible in the surrounding area. The program blends ancestral Chinese traditions with artificial intelligence. This immersive public show features around 7 minutes of fireworks, accompanied by colored smoke, intermittent flashes of light and a moderate sound level. A great appetizer to discover just before the Because Music label's take-over, which will draw the curtain with all its artists on October 24 and 25, this event promises to be magical.

This performance marks a historic moment for the Centre Pompidou. After closing on September 22, 2025, the building begins a major five-year renovation. But before it bids farewell, the institution offers us this explosive celebration designed especially for its facade with the help of cAI™, the artist's personal artificial intelligence, a kind of Cai Guo-Qiang's own ChatGPT. In three acts - "Le banquet", "L'éveil de l'intelligence artificielle" and "Le dernier carnaval" - this pyrotechnic fresco will reflect the past, present and future of the Centre Pompidou, while questioning the non-human view of art history in front of this facade with its much-criticized architecture. We couldn't imagine a more appropriate farewell ceremony for this emblematic building on Place Georges-Pompidou!

"For the first time in its history, the iconic facade of the Centre Pompidou building becomes a monumental tableau, the surface on which Cai will compose his latest work of fire and light, undoubtedly the most profound and complex of his career, before the Parisian public", enthuses Jérôme Neutres, curator of the event. Let's face it, witnessing such an architectural transformation in the heart of Beaubourg is something of a rarity.

The facade of the Centre Pompidou, with its unmistakable colored pipes, will be transformed into a living canvas for the duration of a unique performance. The 3D model supplied by the artist promises to be a spectacular and colorful show.

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Cai Guo-Qiang is an enthusiast of gunpowder, whether for painting or pyrotechnics, and has literally set the world's greatest stages ablaze. Based in New York, this artist studied the properties of gunpowder in Japan between 1986 and 1995, before launching into monumental performances with poetic and political significance. He also produces drawings and installations, notably based on animal replicas, such as his famous Head on (2006): a pack of 99 fake wolves leaping through the air to crash into a glass wall. After winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999, and being exhibited at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in 2000, he became the first Chinese artist to be honored with a retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York in 2008.

Star of the Netflix documentary L'Échelle céleste (2016), the artist undoubtedly inspired the spectacular blue-white-red painting shot over the Austerlitz bridge during the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics, which was very reminiscent of his performance When the Sky Blooms with Sakura (2023), commissioned by the House of Yves Saint Laurent. His explosive works travel around the world, making a lasting impression with their monumental scale and symbolic impact. For this performance at the Centre Pompidou, he collaborated with Groupe F, the French pyrotechnics specialists who have mastered the art of transforming the sky into a tableau vivant.

The performance at the Centre Pompidou is eagerly awaited and promises to be one of the highlights of the end of the Parisian cultural year. It will be followed, on October 24 and 25, by a major event organized with the Because Music label, for a spectacular closing of this great flagship of Parisian art. The establishment will then roll out its Constellation program during the works, taking its collection and programming on a tour of France and the rest of the world. A great opportunity to see the collection dispersed to different locations before returning to the renovated building in five years' time.

This free 20-minute performance will take place on October 22, 2025 at 5:30pm on Place Georges-Pompidou, in the heart of the 4th arrondissement, in the Beaubourg district, a stone's throw from the Marais and Hôtel de Ville. Access requires a free reservation on the Centre Pompidou's official website. If the forecourt is already fully booked, there's nothing to stop you finding an ideal vantage point from which to admire the façade from afar.