François Morellet 100 pour 100

Exhibition at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, 3 April – 28 September 2026

François Morellet (1926–2016) is unique in that he is both the leading French exponent of geometric abstraction and the artist who contributed most decisively to its destabilisation.

This catalogue of the exhibition organised to mark Morellet’s centenary explores the ambivalence between reason and unreason, between the legacy of Francis Picabia and that of Piet Mondrian, which the artist liked to invoke. From his early pictorial experiments of the 1940s, rarely shown until now, to his baroque neon works of the 2010s, it highlights both the Morellet of the triumph of the ruler and the glories of pictorial materialism, and that of optical unreason and neo-Dadaist detachment.