A new contemporary art center called Large opened this Saturday on the Ile Séguin, an island on the Seine River just outside Paris, according to The Art Newspaper. The non-profit institution, which holds no dedicated collection of its own, launched with an inaugural show built around the island’s history as a car manufacturing site.
Large sits on the Ile Séguin between Porte de Saint-Cloud and Pont de Sèvres, where the Seine exits central Paris to the southwest, The Art Newspaper reported. The art center forms part of the larger Pointe des Arts development on the island.
What Happened And What Large Is
Large is a philanthropic project of the Emerige real estate group, according to The Art Newspaper. The building itself is a six-story, wedge-shaped structure with 2,500 square meters of exhibition space, making it one of the more sizable additions to the Paris-area contemporary art scene.
Unlike a traditional museum, Large does not maintain its own permanent collection. Instead, the center is built around public access and a focus on promoting artists who live and work in France, regardless of their nationality, per the outlet.
Paula Aisemberg, Large’s director, described the center’s goals in comments reported by The Art Newspaper. “The French art scene is particularly riveting,” Aisemberg said. “We want to support it, promote it and make it accessible to the wider public, be that the international art crowd that doesn’t necessarily know it that well, or the local public that doesn’t always have access to it.”
The Inaugural Exhibition And The Island’s History
Large opened its doors with a show that draws on the Ile Séguin’s industrial past as an automotive manufacturing hub. Renault owned the island from 1919 until 1992, when the car plant there closed, according to The Art Newspaper. The inaugural exhibition riffs directly on that history, though the outlet did not report a specific title for the show.
The choice to open with automotive-themed programming ties the new art center to the physical site it now occupies, grounding the venue’s debut in the island’s own past rather than treating the location as a blank slate.
Getting There And What’s Next
Access to the Ile Séguin is set to improve in the coming years. A new metro station on the Grand Paris Express network is scheduled to open at Pont de Sèvres in 2027, according to The Art Newspaper. Once that station opens, Large will sit just minutes from the La Défense business district and roughly half an hour from Orly airport.
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