Large Opens on Île Seguin With Cecilia Alemani’s Imaginary Engine

By Darren Smith, Arts Reporter
October 18, 2026

Greater Paris opened a new contemporary art centre yesterday on the former Renault island in the Seine. Large — also styled le Large — began public hours on Saturday, October 17, 2026, at 3, parvis Amont, Île Seguin, 92100 Boulogne-Billancourt, with Cecilia Alemani’s inaugural exhibition Imaginary Engine (Moteur Imaginaire). The official programme keeps the show on view through March 7, 2027, in partnership with the Fonds Renault pour l’Art et la Culture. For a desk that spent the last two weeks on museum openings already in the log, this is unused news: a new building, a named curator, a dated run, and a first hang that treats the island’s factory past as more than a plaque.

The Art Newspaper, writing on October 16, described Large as a non-profit without a dedicated collection, backed by the Emerige real estate group and set at the core of the wider Pointe des Arts development. That framing matters. The paper contrasted the project with private museums in the vein of the Cartier and Louis Vuitton foundations and quoted director Paula Aisemberg on a public-access brief aimed at artists living and working in France, regardless of nationality. Large’s own visit page does not repeat the non-profit language; it presents a bookshop, a cinema, a coffee shop, a hotel and a sculpture park as the visit’s extensions. Those are two registers — press architecture and house visitor copy — and they are being kept separate here.

What opened Saturday — at a glance

• Institution: Large / le Large, a new contemporary art centre on Île Seguin
• Inaugural exhibition: Imaginary Engine / Moteur Imaginaire
• Dates: October 17, 2026–March 7, 2027
• Curator: Cecilia Alemani
• Partner: Fonds Renault pour l’Art et la Culture
• Address: 3, parvis Amont Île Seguin, 92100 Boulogne-Billancourt

Alemani’s hang is not a greatest-hits loan show bolted onto a lobby. The official exhibition page says the selection “explores the complex relationship between people and the machines we create, with a particular focus, of course, on the automobile.” That sentence is the curator’s, published by the house. The same page then gives the scale in two complementary counts that should not be collapsed into one: 50 modern masterpieces from the Renault fund sit with newly commissioned contemporary works; the full presentation brings together more than one hundred works made from the 1930s to the present, by 55 artists from 23 countries, nearly half of whom live or work in France. Seventeen artists were invited to make new work for the opening. Those figures are Large’s. They are not a door count from Saturday’s first hour.

Key facts for readers and visitors

Fact	Detail	Source basis
Public opening	October 17, 2026	Large exhibition page; The Art Newspaper, Oct. 16
Run	Through March 7, 2027	large-emerige.fr exhibition and ticketing pages
Curator	Cecilia Alemani	Large official listing
Works / artists	100+ works; 55 artists from 23 countries; 17 new commissions	Large official listing
Renault holdings in the hang	50 modern masterpieces from the Fonds Renault	Large official listing
Building scale	Six stories; 2,500 sq m of exhibition space	The Art Newspaper, Oct. 16
Architects (complex)	RCR Arquitectes with CALQ	The Art Newspaper, Oct. 16
Director	Paula Aisemberg	The Art Newspaper, Oct. 16
Full admission	€15 (reduced €10; free under 26 with proof)	Large visit page
Hours	Wed–Sun 11 a.m.–7 p.m.; Friday late to 9 p.m.; closed Mon–Tue	Large visit page

The architecture package is still, for this desk, a named secondary report rather than a house specification sheet. The Art Newspaper said the Pointe des Arts trio combines Corten steel, copper-coloured aluminum cladding and glass, and that the three buildings house an eight-screen cinema, retail, offices and Large. It called Large a wedge six stories tall with 2,500 square metres of exhibition space. Large’s visit page confirms the street address and the mix of bookshop, cinema, coffee shop, hotel and sculpture park, but it does not reprint the square-metre figure or the architect credit. Visitors should treat 2,500 square metres and the RCR/CALQ attribution as The Art Newspaper’s reporting unless the house later posts the same numbers.

Five chapters on a factory island

The official page splits Imaginary Engine into five titled chapters. Factory of My Thoughts returns to Renault’s late-1960s “Recherche, Art et Industrie” programme, which, Large says, gave artists access to the factory and its material and human resources. The names attached to that first chapter are Simon Hantaï, Julio Le Parc, Jean Tinguely, Jean Dubuffet, Victor Vasarely, Arman and Robert Doisneau. Driving Forces treats the car, the engine and the assembly line as metaphors for twentieth-century social systems, with Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Erró, Thomas Bayrle, Arman, Zhenya Machneva (new commission), Nina Beier, Bertrand Lavier (new commission) and Alain Jacquet. Those lists are the house’s section credits, not a complete wall label.

• Social Bodies: workers’ lives, especially women and migrant workers — Leila Alaoui, Clément Cogitore, Giulia Andreani, Mohamed El Khatib, Randa Maroufi (Cogitore, Andreani and El Khatib marked as new commissions; Maroufi is listed without that tag)
• Objects of Desire: the car as extension of the body and fetish — Shirin Aliabadi, Selma Selman, Niki de Saint Phalle, Kenneth Anger, Bianca Bondi, Oliver Beer
• The Human Machine: automation, algorithms, posthumanism — Théo Mercier, Valentin Ranger, Madeline Hollander, Daniel Otero Torres, Sara Sadik, Monira Al Qadiri

Several 2026 commissions are named with titles on the same page. Giulia Andreani’s Amaxophobia is shown courtesy of the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler. Mohamed El Khatib’s R12 cathédrale and Bertrand Lavier’s R23-F1 are listed in the Collection of the Fonds de dotation Emerige, Paris. Zhenya Machneva’s Souvenirs cassés is credited to Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois. Oliver Beer appears with Resonance Painting (Too Many Kids Finding Rain in the Dust) (2026) and Live Stream (The Seine, Paris) (2016–2026). Sara Sadik’s TALOS & TALS MARKETPLACE, Théo Mercier’s Origins of speed series, Valentin Ranger’s ChronoFactory: L’Anatomie de l’ornementation, Bianca Bondi’s Analog Pits, Johanna Benaïnous’s Le ventre mécanique, Bertille Bak’s Écart de conduite and Clément Cogitore’s untitled 2026 work complete the titled-commission cluster Large has published. Installation photographs on the site are by Aurélien Mole unless a specific caption says otherwise. This desk is not inventing additional titles from those photographs.

The artist roll published under the exhibition title runs from Monira Al Qadiri and Leila Alaoui through Victor Vasarely, and it is long enough to make a point: the hang is not a closed Renault-alumni reunion. Judy Chicago, Ed Ruscha, Harun Farocki, Laure Prouvost, Mohamed Bourouissa, Rose B. Simpson and Paa Joe with Jacob Paa Joe Jr. sit on the same public list as Arman and Tinguely. Nearly half of the 55 artists, Large says, live or work in France. That is the institutional argument Aisemberg made to The Art Newspaper in different words: the French scene as the centre of gravity, opened to an international crowd that does not always know it and to a local public that does not always get in.

Who is steering the first hang

Alemani’s house biography is unusually specific, and it is being repeated as biography, not as a verdict on Saturday’s rooms. Large says the Italian curator, based in New York, has been Director and Chief Curator of High Line Art since 2011, launched the High Line Plinth, curated Once Within A Time, the 12th SITE Santa Fe International, in 2025, and served as Artistic Director of the 59th Venice Biennale from 2020 to 2022, where The Milk of Dreams “welcomed more than 800,000 visitors.” She curated the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum has appointed her curator of the 15th Taipei Biennial, to be held in 2027. Those are Large’s sentences. They explain why a new suburban art centre would hand its first rooms to a curator whose last decade was spent on public platforms rather than on a single-collector private museum.

The island itself is the other curator. The Art Newspaper placed Île Seguin between Porte de Saint-Cloud and Pont de Sèvres and said Renault owned the island from 1919 to 1992. After the plant shuttered, the paper wrote, the Hauts-de-Seine department tried to turn the site into a cultural destination. François Pinault’s museum plans were “thwarted by red tape.” A later R4 art-city project that Jean Nouvel was to design was sold by Yves Bouvier “before it could be built.” Emerige’s Laurent Dumas, the paper said, founded the Révélations Emerige prize in 2014 for unrepresented artists under 35 and has now opened the building. Boulogne-Billancourt mayor Pierre-Christophe Baguet is quoted there calling the redevelopment the “jewel in the crown” of the department’s Vallée de la Culture initiative, launched in 2008. Those civic claims remain The Art Newspaper’s, not Large’s wall text.

How to see it this week

• Hours: Wednesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Friday late opening until 9 p.m.; closed Monday and Tuesday
• Last admission: 45 minutes before closing
• Closed: January 1, May 1, December 25
• Tickets: €15 full; €10 reduced (students 26 and over, teachers, accredited guides, groups of 10 or more, listed professional cards); free for under-26s, disabled visitors plus one companion, artists and authors, and other listed proof categories
• Transit: Metro line 9 to Pont de Sèvres or Billancourt, about a 12-minute walk; bus 42 to Île Seguin, about one minute; tram T2 to Brimborion, about five minutes
• Phone: 01 89 40 79 89

The visit page adds practical grain that does not belong in a caption but does belong in a morning file. Large says the building is fully accessible, with a lift to all levels. Free lockers measure 29 × 37.6 × 35 centimetres; valuables cannot be stored; bicycle batteries and helmets go to the cloakroom; suitcases are not accepted. The fourth-floor coffee shop, Extra Large, has a terrace toward the Seine and the Meudon slopes and can take up to 80 people. The ground-floor bookshop is selling the Imaginary Engine catalogue. Ticketing is live at the house store for the exhibition through March 7, 2027, with children’s workshops listed from October 21. Those workshop dates are on the ticket page; they are not a substitute for the exhibition itself.

Aisemberg’s quote in The Art Newspaper is the policy sentence under the architecture: “The French art scene is particularly riveting. We want to support it, promote it and make it accessible to the wider public, be that the international art crowd that doesn’t necessarily know it that well, or the local public that doesn’t always have access to it.” The paper also noted a forthcoming Grand Paris Express station at Pont de Sèvres, scheduled for 2027, as the infrastructure that would put the island minutes from La Défense. That transit claim is the paper’s schedule, not a ticket-office promise printed by Large.

For ArtChain readers, yesterday’s opening is the clean peg. A new centre on a factory island now has public hours, a fixed end date, a named curator, a published artist count, a ticket ladder, and an inaugural argument about people, machines and the automobile that can be walked rather than announced. The remaining question is not whether Île Seguin wanted culture — the department has wanted that since the plant closed — but whether Imaginary Engine can hold a first season without becoming a developer’s lobby. The rooms are open Wednesday through Sunday. The house numbers are on large-emerige.fr. Go read the commissions against the Renault holdings, and keep the square-metre figure tagged to the newspaper that printed it until the institution prints its own.