On the Île Seguin, the countdown is drawing to a close. Le Large, the new contemporary art center backed by the Groupe Emerige in Boulogne-Billancourt, in the Hauts-de-Seine (92), will welcome its first visitors this Saturday, October 17, 2026. The opening weekend of October 17 and 18 is free, but registration is required.
For its unveiling, the venue presents Moteur Imaginaire, ranging from Renault’s collection masterpieces to today’s artists, on view until March 7, 2027. The tally: 120 works dating from the 1930s to the present, 55 artists from 23 countries and 17 new creations, installed right where Renault used to assemble its cars.
The symbol runs deep. It was here that the 4CV was born—the famous “four horses” launched in 1947, turning the car into a staple of millions of French homes. The last car rolled off the island’s assembly lines on March 31, 1992. Thirty-four years later, the engine roars again, this time in the realm of the imagination, and many works return to the place where they were born.
On Saturday, October 17 and Sunday, October 18, 2026, entry to Le Large is free for everyone. One requirement: pre-register online via the art center's form, choosing your visit day and indicating whether you’ll be accompanied by an adult or a child. Better not delay—these opening days tend to draw big crowds.
This inauguration weekend is, by the way, part of our guide to free exhibitions in October 2026. To plan the rest of your days, have a look at our outing ideas for Saturday, October 17, and Sunday, October 18.
To head out to sea is to leave the shore behind and shift your perspective. The expression also hides a charming Parisian anecdote: in nautical language, open water begins at six nautical miles. That’s exactly the distance between Paris’s zero point on the forecourt of Notre-Dame and the tip of the Île de la Cité, as the Seine threads its way along the island.
The word now signals a clear ambition: to welcome the broadest possible audience, from newcomers to seasoned aficionados. Nearly 40% of the spaces are free to visit, starting with the atrium where you can already encounter the opening works of the exhibition without a ticket. And the free admission doesn’t end there: it covers everyone under 26, regardless of status, as well as a long list of audiences, from job seekers to teachers in Île-de-France.
The project aims to be culturally rich while staying financially balanced. Led by an association chaired by Laurent Dumas, founder of Emerige, Le Large relies on a hybrid model: ticketing, a coffee shop, a bookstore/retail shop, and corporate space rental that together round out the group’s support.
The through line is a single question: what relationship do we have with the machines we build? The car acts as an entry point, at once a symbol of freedom, an object of desire, and a witness to dwindling resources. Designed in collaboration with the Renault Foundation for Art and Culture, the exhibition brings together 50 pieces from the automaker’s historic collection, some of which had not been publicly shown for more than forty years.
The exhibition brings together the artists invited to work at the very heart of the factory as early as 1967, within the Recherches, Art et Industrie program: Jean Tinguely and his Requiem for a Dead Leaf, Jean Dubuffet, Victor Vasarely, Arman, and Julio Le Parc. Born in the island’s workshops, thanks to the materials and know-how of the workers, these works are now returning to their cradle. The photographs by Robert Doisneau, invited by Louis Renault in 1934 to capture factory life, complete this homecoming. The parcours unfolds in five chapters :
Driving forces: the assembly line derailed by humor, accident and chance, featuring Fischli & Weiss, Erró, Thomas Bayrle, Nina Beier, Alain Jacquet or Bertrand Lavier.
Objects of Desire: the car as an extension of the body, a fetish object that becomes a wreck surrendered to nature, featuring Niki de Saint Phalle, Judy Chicago, Kenneth Anger, Selma Selman and Bianca Bondi.
The human machine: a future ruled by data and algorithms, featuring Théo Mercier, Neïl Beloufa, Madeline Hollander, Valentin Ranger, and Sara Sadik.
In terms of staging, set designer Pascal Rodriguez conceived the main hall as a car chassis or a production line. Visitors pass through a sequence of round openings, like portholes, guiding the journey from one work to another, beneath a gigantic structure suspended five meters above the floor and draped with archival images of the island from the Renault era.
Seventeen artists have been commissioned by Le Large, and that’s where the visit truly comes alive. Bertrand Lavier coats a Renault F1 in broad brushstrokes in a Van Gogh-like style, as if to slow a machine born for speed. Bianca Bondi lets a Renault 9 carcass crystallize slowly under the touch of salt, water, and plants.
Romuald Jandolo turns a 1970s Renault Estafette into a rolling chapel with the glint of a stained-glass window, while Mohamed El Khatib stacks a Renault 12 high with luggage to tell the journeys of immigrant families. The Ghanaian artist Paa Joe, a master of carved coffins, teams up with his son to reinterpret the 1899 Renault Type B as a palanquin.
Other works lean into the intimate. Bertille Bak collaborated with former island workers on the wig, those small objects quietly crafted with materials from the workshop. Zhenya Machneva hand-weaves the engine from a Kangoo, the one belonging to her grandfather, and Johanna Benaïnous, granddaughter of a Billancourt factory worker, follows the trail of the vanished plant. With Neïl Beloufa, it’s you who operate the algorithm of an autonomous car, tasked with sorting and censoring streams of images.
The Large has tapped its first exhibition to Cecilia Alemani, an Italian curator based in New York. She serves as artistic director of the 59th Venice Biennale and its show The Milk of Dreams, which drew more than 800,000 visitors in 2022. Since 2011, she has also led the High Line’s public art program in New York and is gearing up for the Taipei Biennale in 2027.
Moteur Imaginaire marks its very first exhibition designed in France. Its outsider perspective aligns with the venue’s mission to champion the French arts scene: 26 of the artists on display are French or based in France, and gender parity is nearly achieved, with women making up 49%.
Architecture in its own right is worth the trip. This is the first project in Greater Paris by the Catalan firm RCR Arquitectes, 2017 Pritzker Prize winners and creators of the Soulages Museum in Rodez, in collaboration with the Paris-based CALQ agency. Its concave and convex curves subtly recall a car body, a nod to the site's memory.
Spanning 5,000 square meters, including 2,500 square meters of exhibition space, the visit unfolds in a rhythm of compression and expansion. It starts in a 370-square-meter atrium, flows into a long corridor, then a monumental escalator hoists you up to the fourth floor. The main hall there stretches over 1,000 square meters without a single pillar, reaching up to 14 meters high. Two 500-square-meter rooms sit on the upper levels, and you descend via a double-spiral staircase.
The light is never direct here: it threads through slivers of anodized aluminum, while the calamine steel floor gives the space an unexpectedly matte patina. A 500-square-meter terrace, planted with greenery, surrounds the building, with views over the Seine and the hills of Meudon.
Le Large doesn't just hang works of art. With the nearby Pathé Île Seguin cinema, it launches Plan Large, a film cycle devoted to cars and endless roads, shown on two Sundays a month. Bonus: a cinema ticket entitles you to the reduced price for the exhibition. Here's the program:
On Friday evenings, journalist Arnaud Laporte hosts Rendez-vous au Large, public conversations with artists, writers, filmmakers, or architects, from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. :
Finally, on Saturday, February 27, 2027, from 2 to 6 p.m., Battements d'acier brings krump, the urban dance born in Los Angeles, into a venue steeped in labor history. A day of workshops and performances imagined by dancer Maria Hormat.
In the wake of the opening weekend, the exhibition is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., with a Friday late opening until 9 p.m. The venue is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Admission is €15 in full price and €10 for the reduced rate, with tickets available on the official ticketing page. Entry is free for everyone under 26, for people with disabilities and their companions, for job seekers, for RSA beneficiaries, for artists and authors, and for teachers in Île-de-France. The details of the pricing are on the Large’s practical information page. Regular visitors can opt for the Solo Pass at €25 or the Duo Pass at €50, valid for one year.
With your ticket, the educators offer free tours with no booking required: the 20-minute Large Express flash tours at 11am, 12pm, 2pm, 3pm, and 5:30pm, and the 45-minute Grand Large tour at 4pm, from Wednesday to Sunday. Families are not forgotten. Le Petit Atelier, conceived by designer Constance Guisset, welcomes children aged 6-12 for free with reservations on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. The 3-6 year olds can enjoy their weekend Mini Large storytelling tour at 11am (€10 per child), and a 2:30pm workshop-tour awaits the 6-12 year olds (€5 per child).
Le Large is located at 3, Parvis Amont, at the tip of the island. Cars don’t have much room here anymore, and that’s a good thing: you can reach it on foot or by bike. The bus 42 stops just a minute away (Île Seguin stop), the tram T2 about five minutes away (Brimborion), and the Pont de Sèvres and Billancourt stations on metro line 9 are roughly a 12-minute walk, with line 15 slated for 2027. Several Vélib’ stations surround the island, and parking is laid out along the banks, on both the Boulogne and Meudon sides.
On site, the visit continues at the coffee shop Extra Large and its panoramic terrace on the fourth floor, or at the librairie-boutique on the ground floor, run by the teams at GrandPalaisRmn, where you can find the exhibition catalog.
Imaginary Engine seems tailor-made for the curious who don’t always dare to push open the door of a contemporary art center. The subject—the factory and the car—speaks to everyone, and the historical works provide keys for approaching the newer creations. The Boulogne locals, including a relative who once worked at Renault, will no doubt find a particularly resonant echo there.
Families have plenty of reasons to drop by with the Petit Atelier, and free entry for those under 26 makes it even more inviting. Architecture enthusiasts will find a building to explore inside and out. The exhibition is dense: 120 works across three galleries, so plan on at least two hours.
A tip: budget half a day and then enjoy a stroll through the Parc Départemental Gauthier Mougin and its thirty sculptures on Île Seguin, followed soon after by a meal at Bouillon sur Seine nearby. One caveat: on weekends the park opens only with advance registration, otherwise there’s no guaranteed entry.
Did you enjoy the dialogue between art and automobiles? Head to the Champs-Élysées to see pop art car 2.0, the free exhibition where Vasarely and Julio Le Parc are on view. And for another major collecting-focused show right now, the Bourse de Commerce presents Remember Me, featuring around 700 photographic masterpieces from the Pinault Collection. Also find all our expositions à voir en octobre 2026.
Dates and Opening Time
From October 17, 2026 to March 7, 2027
Location
Large: the Île Seguin contemporary art center
355 Quai Georges Gorse
92100 Boulogne Billancourt
Route planner
Prices
Moins de 26 ans: Free
17 et 18 octobre: Free
Tarif réduit: €10
Plein tarif: €15
Recommended age
For all
Official website
www.large-emerige.fr
