"The Sea Is Your Mirror" opens at Saint-Germain Abbey with works from the Centre Pompidou
Peter Doig, Canoe-Island, 2000. Screenprint on paper, 75.1 x 101.8 cm. Gift of the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, 2003 © Peter Doig. All Rights Reserved, DACS / Adagp, Paris. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn.
AUXERRE.—
The sea becomes a mirror for desire, imagination and environmental unease in a new exhibition at Saint-Germain Abbey in Auxerre, where works by Peter Doig, Man Ray, Robert Delaunay, Jean Painlevé and a younger generation of international artists explore humanity’s enduring fascination with the marine world.
Now open through November 1, 2026, “The Sea Is Your Mirror” brings selections from the Centre Pompidou’s modern and contemporary art collection into one of Auxerre’s most historically layered sites.
The exhibition is the fifth developed through a partnership established in 2022 between the City of Auxerre and the Centre Pompidou. It also forms part of the museum’s Constellation program, created to extend its collection and activities beyond Paris during the Centre Pompidou’s wider transformation.
The setting gives the exhibition an unusual historical depth. Saint-Germain Abbey contains nearly 16 centuries of architecture, including a Carolingian crypt, a 12th-century chapter house and a 14th-century cellar. Contemporary representations of oceans, rivers and submerged environments are placed in dialogue with spaces shaped by centuries of religious, civic and cultural life.
Organized in connection with the Auxerre festival Les Grands Récits, which focused on the sea this year, the exhibition approaches water as both a physical environment and a psychological space.
Its title comes from Man and the Sea, Charles Baudelaire’s meditation on the affinity between human beings and the ocean. For Baudelaire, the sea reflects the freedom, depth, bitterness and secrecy of the human soul. That idea provides the conceptual thread linking works that range from lyrical representations of water to critical reflections on ecological damage.
A space of dreams and uncertainty
The exhibition presents the sea as an inexhaustible source of artistic invention. It can appear calm and inviting, but also violent, resistant and capable of overwhelming those who enter it.
Some artists evoke imaginary marine creatures and mermaids. Others envision submerged worlds, study aquatic life or confront the effects of humanity’s exploitation of oceans and rivers.
The result is not a conventional exhibition of seascapes. Instead, “The Sea Is Your Mirror” examines how artists use water to speak about states of mind, political realities, scientific inquiry and the unstable relationship between humans and nature.
Peter Doig’s Canoe-Island of 2000, reproduced as the principal image for the exhibition, condenses many of these tensions. A solitary figure sits in a long canoe on a dark expanse of water, while an island appears beneath a luminous, almost unnatural sky.
The scene seems familiar yet difficult to locate. Its combination of isolation, beauty and uncertainty reflects Doig’s broader interest in memories and images that appear suspended between reality and dream.
The exhibition brings Doig into conversation with artists from several generations, including Robert Delaunay, Man Ray, Jacques Monory and Gilles Aillaud.
The inclusion of filmmaker and biologist Jean Painlevé, celebrated for his pioneering underwater films, introduces a scientific and cinematic perspective. Painlevé’s images revealed marine animals as strange, complex presences, frequently blurring distinctions between documentary observation and surrealist fantasy.
Works by contemporary figures including Shimabuku, Adel Abdessemed, Janaina Tschäpe, John Gerrard, Neri Oxman, Korakrit Arunanondchai and Hicham Berrada extend the exhibition into questions of technology, ecology and speculative environments.
Nicolas Floc’h captures the colors beneath the rivers
One of the exhibition’s most permanent contributions is a new site-specific work by French artist Nicolas Floc’h, created for the abbey’s 12th-century chapter house.
Floc’h has transformed wide-angle underwater photographs from his series The Color of Water into stained-glass panels. The images record the natural colors found beneath the surfaces of the Yonne and Seine rivers.
Rather than depicting water from a distant or picturesque viewpoint, Floc’h enters the aquatic environment and records the changing effects of light, sediment and biological material. The resulting colors reveal that bodies of water commonly imagined as blue can appear green, brown, gold or almost opaque depending on local conditions.
Placed within stained glass, the underwater photographs bring natural river light into dialogue with a medium historically associated with sacred architecture. The work connects the abbey’s past to contemporary environmental observation without attempting to disguise the differences between them.
Following the exhibition, the installation will remain at Saint-Germain Abbey as part of its permanent collection.
A partnership beyond Paris
“The Sea Is Your Mirror” continues a series of annual projects organized by Auxerre and the Centre Pompidou.
The partnership began in 2022 with an introductory presentation of works from the museum’s collection. It continued with “Echoes,” an exhibition devoted to sound; “Botany of Imaginations,” which explored artistic approaches to plants and nature; and “Quest for Infinities,” presented in 2025.
Each exhibition has been conceived for the abbey rather than treated as a traveling presentation placed within a neutral venue. The current project similarly responds to the architecture and to the historical collections already housed on the site.
That approach reflects a larger effort by the Centre Pompidou to circulate its holdings and build sustained relationships with institutions and communities outside the capital.
Curated by Pamela Sticht, with assistance from Maximilien Theinhardt, the exhibition draws together 18 artists whose works approach water through painting, printmaking, film, design, installation and technologically driven practices.
Across those different media, the sea is never simply a backdrop. It becomes a surface onto which artists project fear, wonder, memory and desire, as well as an environment whose fragility increasingly demands attention.
“The Sea Is Your Mirror” is on view at Saint-Germain Abbey in Auxerre through November 1, 2026.
