A Massive Contemporary Art Center Just Opened on an Island Outside Paris

A brand new art museum on a once-abandoned island in the middle of the Seine?

That was a tantalizing prospect that I had to check out for myself when I was in Paris last week for Art Basel and the attendant events, sandwiched between two weekends of huge protests that riveted the world’s attention (and shortened the fair by two days).

So I took Metro Line 9 to the Billancourt stop, and then embarked on a 20-minute walk that led over a bridge to the Île Seguin, where a new art center, Large, just opened. A taxi or Uber would have worked just fine, but given that Large is just outside Paris’s city limits, I was curious to check out the neighborhood, which is quiet and pleasant.

The island has a concert hall on one end, opened in 2017, a desolate middle stretch where a sculpture park will go, and then the multi-use development of which Large is part. It’s a creation of the collector Laurent Dumas, president of the real estate company Group Emierge.

The real estate connection had me a little skeptical at first, since developers often use art centers to boost the value of their holdings, but I was won over by the first show and the center’s overall concept.

For starters, the building, by Pritzker Prize winners RCR Arquitectes, strikes me as clean-lined and easily navigable, and at some 54,000 square feet, quite a sizable institution with a lot of potential for installations and experimentation. The exterior’s combination of rusted metal and shiny copper-ish panels cuts a striking figure as you approach.

I was met by the center’s director, Paula Aisemberg.

“We don’t have a permanent collection, and we are going to function more as a Kunsthalle,” she tells me. Although Dumas is a collector, Large is not meant to be a repository for his own trove, though sometimes his works will be lent and appear in shows; a handful are on view now.

Large’s focus is simple. “Our main program is dedicated to the French art scene,” Aisemberg says, though it’s an expansive view of French-ness, with exceptions allowed.

The opening show, “Imaginary Engine,” on view until March 3, was curated by Cecilia Alemani, the acclaimed chief curator of the High Line in New York and erstwhile Venice Biennale artistic director. Some of the best-known artists on view are Arman, Robert Doisneau, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Jean Dubuffet, Rose B. Simpson, and Judy Chicago.

The first exhibition very much ties into the island’s unique history: It was once entirely occupied by an enormous Renault car factory, a symbol of the company’s might.

“They left in 1992, and the factory was demolished in 2004,” says Aisemberg. As it happens, Renault was a forward-thinking art-commissioning and art-collecting company in its heyday, and that informed the show, too.

As you enter the museum, you see a very long, horizontal, rainbow-striped work (made of 45 panels and auto body paint) by Julio Le Parc that was in the Renault collection. Even though the company had nothing to do with the Large’s creation, they lent some pieces from their collection for the opening show.

Aisemberg tapped Alemani, an Italian-born curator who lives in New York, to organize this very French show because she “knows how to install artworks in public spaces, and we have this ambition to be open to the biggest audience,” says Aisemberg.

Alemani tells me she likes “the sense of an industrial past that is present in the island.”

Her five-part show—with section titles like “The Human Machine”—touches on automobiles and manufacturing but does not feel too on the nose. “It’s not a show about cars,” she says. “I think it’s a show that talks about the dreams and imagination that we project onto the idea of the factory.”

Large and Alemani commissioned 17 new works for the opening exhibition by artists including Sara Sadik, Bianca Bondi, Bertrand Lavier, Thu Van Tran, and Giulia Andreani.

Although it is always a hit of art-going dopamine to see a huge, intricate Jean Dubuffet sculpture—Le mur bleu, 1967, is on prominent display—a few of the newly commissioned pieces caught my eye as particular highlights.

Mohamed El Khatib’s “documentary installation,” R12 Cathédrale, is a sculpture of sorts comprising an actual green station wagon piled high with strapped-on suitcases and stuffed with personal items inside. It refers to the North African workers who would drive from the Renault plant back to places like Morocco. “It reminds him of his personal history and the history of a lot of immigrants,” says Aisemberg.

Clément Cogitor’s untitled film features women who are knitting on a factory floor. He found a 1940s era photograph of female workers who were passing the time while on strike at the Renault plant and imagined, What would it be like if they were still there, had gotten old and never left? It’s an amusing take on labor and idleness, illustrated by the length of the knittings they are making, as if they had been underway for decades.

The multipart sculpture Origins of Speed, by Theo Mercier, includes a three-pronged petroleum drill bit that Mercier painted an intense blue-green and mounted on the wall. The treatment of the machinery makes it almost abstract, and it nicely ties the world’s love affair with cars to the oil that must be extracted to make them go.

Presumably, not all future shows at Large will tie their themes so closely to the island’s former life. But Aisemberg and Alemani have demonstrated that it is possible to get good mileage from surprising sources.