Mounted in the MCBA Espace Focus gallery and within The collection, the display of the museum’s permanent collection, the show French Painting 1800-1945. Anatomy of a Collection invites visitors to rediscover the many masterpieces of French painting conserved in the museum. These are pieces signed by a number of major French artists, including Corot, Courbet, Degas, Cezanne, Matisse, and Bonnard. It is also the chance to discover paintings that are rarely on view.

« Come and see here what you won’t see elsewhere! » is the slogan for the permanent exhibition, laid out chronologically over two floors to showcase treasures from Vaud’s art collections, with some three hundred works dating from the eighteenth century to the present day.

MCBA, in collaboration with the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, is presenting a major exhibition devoted to the work of Otobong Nkanga. Conceived in collaboration with the artist, it features emblematic installations, photo series, recent works, and a significant number of drawings, some of which date from her early artmaking days and are being shown for the first time.

Iranian artist Hannah Darabi (b. 1981) was selected as the laureate of the 2025 Prix Elysée by an international jury. In her work, she uses photographs, videos and archive materials to explore popular dance as a form of identity-based resistance rooted in the social and political history of her native country.

Her series set images in dialogue with archives, texts and objects to lay bare the political complexity of contemporary Iran.

The exhibition, unique in Switzerland, retraces Takahata’s career, from Heidi, Girl of the Alps (1974) to Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and The Tale of The Princess Kaguya (2013), through his notebooks and storyboards, original drawings, cels, film and video excerpts and audiovisual documents.

Inferno & Paradiso is an immersive slide-projection exhibition created by Alfredo Jaar, one of the most socially active artists of our day. For this show, Jaar selected 20 contemporary reportage photographers and asked each of them to choose two images from their archives – the most painful one they had taken and the most hopeful one.

Like Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Jaar takes us on a journey through heaven and hell, confronting us with our own (in)sensitivity in the face of the relentless flow of images of human suffering.

With more than 300 glass animals, from the collection of distinguished art historian and Honorary Director of the Louvre Pierre Rosenberg, and pieces from his donation to the musée du Grand Siècle, the exhibition highlights the delicacy of Murano glass animals while questioning our ambivalent relationship with living beings.

Through her sculptures, found objects, writing and films, Marina Xenofontos interrogates the material manifestations of memory and history. For her show in the Espace Projet, she explores the question of space, both virtual and real.

The exhibition Ella Maillart. Photographic Encounters pays tribute to the photographer, traveler and writer on the occasion of her archives being included in the UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Photo Elysée presents a selection of photographs taken by Maillart during her travels in Asia in the 1930s.