Monaco Art Week opened on Monday 27th April with Prince Albert II and Princess Caroline touring the opening exhibition at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, launching the eighth edition of an event that draws galleries, auction houses and collectors into a shared public itinerary across the Principality. The week runs until 1st May, with many of the artists present in person at their respective galleries, while the majority of exhibitions continue well into the summer.

The edition is held under the High Patronage of Prince Albert II and carries a foreword by Princess Alexandra of Hanover, who serves as the event’s figurehead. Writing in the official programme, she reflected on the tension between Monaco’s artistic heritage — the Principality having welcomed Marcel Duchamp, Joséphine Baker and Karl Lagerfeld — and the importance of remaining alive to artists working today. “To excessively draw inspiration from the past, as I once did, one inevitably risks falling back on nostalgia, and miss out on the artists creating in one’s day,” she wrote.

The week is structured around a walking trail linking galleries and institutions across the Principality, complemented by talks, workshops and lectures.

Members of the press completed the trail on Monday, moving between venues spanning the port, the Condamine and the hilltop districts.

Auctions and major houses

On Boulevard des Moulins, Artcurial presents Monaco Sculptures, its seventh edition in partnership with Monte-Carlo Société des Bains de Mer, placing works by César, Arnaldo Pomodoro and Bernard Venet across the Principality’s most emblematic institutions and gardens from April to September. A separate exhibition at Artcurial’s Monaco gallery, running from 27th April to the beginning of May, features 20th-century works including pieces by Hockney, Giacometti, Balla and Warhol, ahead of an auction on 7th July at the Hôtel Hermitage Monte-Carlo.

At the Hôtel des Ventes de Monte-Carlo on Quai Antoine Ier, a public exhibition of 19th-century and modern paintings and sculptures runs from 27th to 29th April ahead of a live auction on 30th April, highlighting major Italian figures including Giorgio de Chirico, Tancredi Parmeggiani, Mario Schifano, Léopold Survage and Edgar Degas.

Christie’s, marking its 260th anniversary this year, is presenting a private Art Deco collection of around 300 lots over two days on 26th and 27th May at its Monaco rooms, with a design sale dedicated to the decorative arts of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Among the most quietly compelling presentations of the week is the Sotheby’s Monaco selection from the collection of Fred Feinsilber, which places 12 works by Victor Brauner alongside pieces by Picasso, Kandinsky, Dubuffet and Giacometti at Moretti Fine Art.

Brauner — a Romanian-born Surrealist who settled in Paris in 1930, living in the same building as Giacometti and Yves Tanguy, and whose first solo Parisian exhibition was introduced by André Breton — remains less widely known than many of his contemporaries despite the singularity of his practice. His works frequently depicted distorted or mutilated eyes, a premonition that proved grotesquely accurate when he lost his own eye intervening in a fight in 1938.

What makes his story particularly compelling is what came next. In 1948, Breton ejected him from the Surrealist group after he refused to support the expulsion of prominent member Roberto Matta. Rather than fade, Brauner turned the rupture into a creative liberation, abandoning Surrealism’s orthodoxies to develop a deeply personal visual language drawing on Egyptian hieroglyphics, Tarot imagery and the occult spiritualism of his Romanian childhood. The movement that had championed him and then cast him out ultimately could not contain him. Feinsilber, a Franco-Romanian collector who devoted his later life to assembling more than 300 works, clearly understood what others had missed. The exhibition travels to Sotheby’s Paris from 30th May to 2nd June ahead of a live auction on 3rd June.

The gallery trail

At the Palais de la Scala, three galleries are presenting simultaneous exhibitions. Opera Gallery Monaco is showing Ron Arad, from 1992 to 2026, a solo survey of more than three decades of work by the Israeli-British designer, including iterations of his Big Easy armchair in steel and resin, This Mortal Coil, the Good Ping Pong Dining Table and Minimalistic Rodin’s Thinker. Arad is present in Monaco this week for talks at the gallery and the Grimaldi Forum on 30th April titled When Design Becomes Art — and Art Becomes Furniture.

Also at the Palais de la Scala, MF Toninelli Art Moderne presents Manzù – Marini, pairing the engravings of Marino Marini — with his characteristic horsemen and figures in tension — alongside bronzes by Giacomo Manzù, notably his Cardinals series, until 29th May. Elisabeth Lillo Renner is showing Virginia Tentindo, in Wonderland, a solo presentation of the Argentine surrealist sculptor who has worked from the historic Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre since 1979 and whose works are held in the NMNM collection, until 28th June.

At the Park Palace on Avenue de la Costa, Moretti Fine Art is presenting a rare copper painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, Sleeping Child (1630–1635), on show until 1st May. The small-format work traces its provenance to 17th-century Rome, having belonged to Prince Flavio Orsini before passing to his wife, Anne-Marie de La Trémoille, Princess of the Ursins.

Almine Rech, also on Avenue de la Costa, is showing Genieve Figgis: Drama Club, a new body of work by the Irish painter whose theatrical compositions blend glamour and the grotesque. The exhibition runs until 25th September.

At Galerie Adriano Ribolzi on Avenue de l’Hermitage, Christo, From Drawings to Reality traces the conceptual and material trajectory of Christo’s practice, from early sketches through to large-scale environmental interventions, in collaboration with One Gallery and Art and Jewels of the World, until 12th June.

Kamil Art Gallery on Avenue Princesse Grace is presenting Olga Sinclair: Dualidad, Cara a Cara, a survey of the Panamanian painter’s career in which historical works and recent canvases are shown in dialogue, until 27th May.

Olga Sinclair is present in Monaco for Art Week for the second time, moving through the gallery to speak with visitors personally about a body of work that has evolved from figurative painting rooted in real life to an increasingly abstract visual language. The daughter of the celebrated Panamanian painter Alfredo Sinclair, she carries a formidable artistic heritage, and is equally passionate about the work of her foundation, which holds the world record for the most children painting simultaneously and continues to play a significant role in arts education for young people in Panama.

NM Contemporary at 17 Rue de la Turbie is showing Alfredo Rapetti Mogol: Alphabet Intime, a solo exhibition of recent works on canvas, paper and marble by the Milan-born artist and Grammy Award-winning lyricist, known under the pseudonym Cheope, who exhibited twice at the Venice Biennale, until 30th June.

Collectimc at 20 Boulevard de Suisse is presenting Les Praticiens de l’Infernal, the collective’s fourth group exhibition featuring eight artists whose work draws on absurdity, parody and a mischievous freedom borrowed from comic strip culture, until 13th June.

HOFA (House of Fine Art), presenting at YellowKorner Monte Carlo on Avenue Henry Dunant, has made a deliberate choice to platform younger, more contemporary artists — a strategy aimed as much at the next generation of collectors as at the art world establishment. Generation Z buyers, the gallery argues, are looking for work that is new, distinctive and carries genuine meaning, and the selection on show reflects that thinking.

Among the standout works are those by Dutch artist Nemo Jantzen, whose pieces reveal themselves differently depending on where you stand. Each glass dome is an artwork in its own right, densely layered with tiny images, but step back and the composition resolves into a face — one is Marilyn Monroe, featuring dozens of small photographs of JFK. The technique is painstaking and the effect quietly arresting. Equally striking is the work of Nigerian artist Ayobola Kekere-Ekun, whose mixed-media pieces use fabric, faux pearls, paper strips and acrylic in a technique that is genuinely unlike anything else on the circuit — tactile, intricate and rooted in themes of gender, memory and mythology that give the work both visual immediacy and real substance.

The exhibition also includes works by Marie Pol, whose oil paintings move between figuration and abstraction; Mark Posey, a Los Angeles-based painter known for large-scale acrylic compositions that weave together history and contemporary life; Fabio La Fauci, whose portrait-based mixed-media works draw on Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism; and Lyès, whose wall sculptures and installations explore mindfulness through colour and form.

The NMNM, in its Villa Paloma and Villa Salis spaces near the Jardin Exotique, anchors the institutional strand of the week. A day of lectures at the Hôtel Métropole Monte-Carlo, organised by the NMNM in complement to the Art Monte-Carlo fair, forms part of the public programming alongside the gallery trail itself.

Caroline Jelmoni, General Secretary of Monaco Art Week, perhaps put it best in her message to this year’s visitors. “A work of art can be overlooked for years, then suddenly hailed as brilliant once time has passed,” she wrote. “But artists don’t need love only in the history books. They need it while they’re still experimenting, questioning themselves, paying for their supplies, and choosing to keep creating when no one is watching.” It is precisely that impulse — to support art in the present, not merely to venerate it in retrospect — that Monaco Art Week, now in its eighth year and growing, continues to make its case for.

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Main photo credit: Michaël Alesi / Palais princier