CaixaForum brings Paris to Barcelona with Matisse and Monet works from Pompidou and Orangérie museums

The Caixa Foundation have revealed their exhibition lineups for the 2025/26 season, bringing a taste of Paris to the Catalan capital with blockbuster exhibits on French artist Henri Matisse, in collaboration with the Pompidou Centre, and another from the Musée de l'Orangerie inspired by Claude Monet's water lilies. 

An immersive audiovisual experience of the songs of nature, a look at the lives and cultures of people living in remote Pacific islands, and an exhibit on a century of domestic film recording that offer fragments of daily life that form a collective memory of society round off CaixaForum’s exhibitions for the upcoming year. 

In the CosmoCaixa science museum, the hugely popular in-house production looking at extraterrestrials and life beyond Earth remains open until August 2026. 

Additionally, the permanent exhibitions will be refreshed, including the addition of a real fossilized Siberian mammoth skeleton, measuring 6 metres long and 3.5 metres tall, and new film projections added to the planetarium. 

The first of the new exhibitions opening in the new season at CaixaForum is ‘Som natura’ – ‘We are nature’ – which kicks off on September 17. Created by the acclaimed Oasis Immersive Studios and in collaboration with National Geographic, the exhibit offers an impactful and immersive experience from the perspective of biodiversity to encourage climate crisis action among visitors. 

The exhibition comprises three immersive spaces that submerge visitors in different universes through cinematographic projections, spatial audio design, and an evocative soundtrack. 

‘Voices of the Pacific – Innovation and tradition’ opens November 6 and pays homage to the richness and diversity of the artistic traditions of the Pacific Islanders through a display of 208 objects, the vast majority on loan from the British Museum in London. 

‘[REC]ORDS. Life through home cinema’ stakes a claim for domestic film recording, which, after so many decades of this technology being part of our lives, has created a collective memory bank with great anthropological, sociological, and historical value. Opening December 2, the exhibition analyzes the reasons why we record ourselves, and examines the changing trends and customs from different eras.

Taking advantage of the fact that Centre Pompidou, one of the most renowned art museums in the world, is closing for extensive renovations from 2025 until 2030, the CaixaForum have struck a collaboration with the Parisian institute to bring some of the works of Henri Matisse to Catalonia from March 26, 2026. ‘Chez Matisse. Legacy of a new painting’ shows the trajectory, evolution, scope, and influence of the great impressionist artist.

Finally, ‘Out of focus. Another vision of art’ takes inspiration from Claude Monet’s series on water lilies to explore the quality of blurriness, a lack of precision as a form of expression, in various media of art. Opening May 20, 2026, the exhibition, created in collaboration with the Paris art centre Musée de l’Orangerie, includes pieces from Monet himself, as well as Alberto Giacometti, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothco, Eva Nielsens, Thomas Ruff, Alfredo Jaar, Soledad Sevilla, Christian Boltanski, Mame-Diarra Niang, and Bill Viola, among others. 

Currently open for visit in the CaixaForum are exhibitions on an analysis and interpretation of Goya’s Black Paintings and Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, as well as Pedro Pablo Rubens and the artists of Flemish Baroque painting.