Bourse de Commerce hosts major Pinault Collection survey marking photography's bicentenary

Barbara Kruger. Untitled (Remember me). 1988/2020. Single-channel video on LED panel, sound, 23 sec. 350.1 × 250.1 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers. Pinault Collection.

PARIS.— As photography celebrates its bicentenary, Pinault Collection is hosting a major group exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce. Opening on 7 October 2026, it features some 700 works by more than 70 artists. Curated by Matthieu Humery, "Remember Me" takes its name from an original work by Barbara Kruger that will be shown in the Rotunda of the museum. The masterpieces and icons from the Pinault Collection featured in this exhibition all pay tribute to the medium of photography, tracing the entire history of this art form, from its earliest endeavours to its most contemporary expressions. Constructed as a free-ranging journey without any chronology, it elicits unexpected correspondences and dialogues between genres and eras to offer viewers an open, sensorially driven experience of the history of photography.

From historical photographs to contemporary images, from Gustave Le Gray to Cindy Sherman, and from Dorothea Lange to Wolfgang Tillmans, by way of Man Ray and Louise Lawler, the Pinault Collection embraces the entire history of the photographic medium through the more than 8,000 prints in its holdings. It also showcases the breadth of its aesthetics and techniques. Presenting it in its entirety on the occasion of the bicentenary of the invention of photography feels especially relevant. And, through a selection of approximately 700 works, this is precisely what the exhibition "Remember Me" does, for the first time ever. Its title, borrowed from a piece by American artist Barbara Kruger, resonates in a thousand ways.

Barbara Kruger

The exhibition’s title comes from Barbara Kruger, the artist invited to occupy the Rotunda with a monumental installation featuring her savvy, hallmark combination of text and image that invites visitors, from the outset, to remember. In a tone ranging from bittersweet to hard‑hitting, the messages chosen by the artist always leave a strong impression, such as I shop therefore I am, which became the title of her iconic work from 1987, held in the Pinault Collection.

The filter of memory

The different sections of the exhibition —which address notions of seriality, composition, portraiture, and even its own disappearance— mingle within a deliberately open exhibition layout. In this way the works talk to one another, engendering an interdisciplinary visual dialogue between past and present.

Marilyn Monroe’s distracted stare captured by Richard Avedon hangs alongside one of Cindy Sherman’s legendary self-portraits that also embodies this actress’ vulnerability, Gustave Le Gray's seascapes flow into Eileen Quinlan’s waves, while August Sander’s citizens of the twentieth‑century come face to face with their reinterpretation by Sherrie Levine in her series "After August Sander".

The question of memory serves as a guiding thread that runs throughout the exhibition, transcending both the materiality of the image and its iconography.

Irving Penn and Raymond Depardon

Lastly, "Remember Me" resonates in every image by Irving Penn and Raymond Depardon, both of whom are given particular prominence in this exhibition, the former through an installation of unprecedented scale that brings together more than 400 photographs from the Pinault Collection, and the latter, with his celebrated series on France.

On the one side, the very essence of beings and things are featured in Gallery 2 of the museum, which has been transformed into a memorial space for Irving Penn, and on the other, we see the France traversedby Raymond Depardon: its shops, individual houses, roads, and public squares. Tinged with a certain nostalgia, they offer portraits of a place where the past and the modern era play off one another.

Curator: Matthieu Humery, Advisor for Photography, Pinault Collection, with the collaboration of Lola Regard, Projects Officer