If you’re travelling in southern France over the coming months and would like to take in some culture along the way, there are a wide range of exhibitions hosted in museums across the region.
With its varied landscapes, distinctive light and rich cultural scene, the southern regions of France have always been a great source of inspiration for artists from across the world. Little surprise, therefore, that the French south is home to a huge number of museums, many of which will be hosting exhibitions throughout the autumn and winter months. We’ve picked out some of the best below.
Paul McCartney Photographs, 1963-64 : Eyes of the Storm
Paul McCartney turns photographer in this fascinating exhibition, which brings together almost 250 images taken by the Beatles star between 1963 and 1964. Rediscovered in his archives in 2020, the photographs capture a pivotal moment as the band moved from British fame to global superstardom. Intimate shots of John, George and Ringo sit alongside images of rehearsals, hotels, airports and city streets, documenting the group’s whirlwind journey through Liverpool, London, Paris and the United States, all offering a vivid glimpse of everyday life in the early 1960s.
Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence / Through 3 January 2027
FAMM Permanent Collection
FAMM (Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins) is the first museum in the world outside of the USA dedicated to female artists. Its Founder, Christian Levett is a British collector and philanthropist that made a career in finance and that retired since then to dedicate himself to the arts. FAMM’s permanent display is conceived as a continuously evolving presentation rather than a fixed chronological survey. Across four floors, approximately 100 works by around 90 major female artists, from Impressionism to contemporary art, are selected from the Levett Collection, which comprises about 750 works. Regular rotations introduce new dialogues between artists including Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Louise Bourgeois, Alice Neel, Marina Abramović and Tracey Emin. The display also changes in response to FAMM’s active international lending programme. Works from the collection have been loaned to institutions across the world, allowing works by women artists to enter wider institutional and art-historical narratives.
FAMM, Mougins / Permanent
Louisa Gagliardi, In Plain Sight
FAMM presents In Plain Sight, the first institutional exhibition in France devoted to Swiss artist Louisa Gagliardi. Curated by Simon de Pury, the exhibition unfolds across two floors, moving from domestic interiors to professional and institutional spaces. Gagliardi develops her compositions digitally in Photoshop, prints them onto PVC, then works their surfaces by hand with gel medium, latex, glitter and nail varnish. Six paintings from her 2025 Reunion series are shown alongside earlier works and four new pieces conceived in response to the Centre d’Art’s medieval architecture, including a large-format work and three trompe-l’œil sculptures. Drawing partly on the corporate interiors of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, the exhibition examines intimacy, surveillance and isolation in an era shaped by screens.
Centre d’art de Mougins / 6 November 2026 – 4 April 2027
Overpainted Photographs: Gerhard Richter
German artist Gerhard Richter is renowned for continually blurring the boundaries between painting and photography. This exhibition showcases a series that first began in the late 1980s and sees Richter apply oil paint, varnish or enamel directly to small photographic prints, smearing, scraping and pressing pigment across images of family, landscapes, cities and everyday life. The exhibition also includes works from the Grauwald (2008) and Museum Visit (2011) series, in which photographs are partially obscured by layers of colour.
Luma Arles / Through 10 January 2027
Ellsworth Kelly – At the Edge of Water
Water takes centre stage in this exhibition devoted to Ellsworth Kelly, the American artist celebrated for his influential approach to abstraction. Curated by Éric de Chassey, the show explores for the first time the role aquatic landscapes played in Kelly’s work, from Belle-Île and the Côte d’Azur to New York and the Caribbean. Rather than depicting these places literally, Kelly translated the changing colour, light and surface of water into drawings, collages, paintings and sculptures. The exhibition also highlights his longstanding ties to the Maeght family and Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where he was a regular guest after exhibiting with Galerie Maeght in Paris.
Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence / Through 15 November 2026
Chagall Couture. A tribute to the artist
This exhibition provides a fresh take on Marc Chagall, the Russian-born French artist celebrated for his dreamlike imagery and blend of fantasy, memory and biblical symbolism. Created in collaboration with stage-costume students from the Lycée des Côteaux in Cannes, the exhibition pairs costumes and headdresses with Chagall’s paintings and engravings, exploring his distinctive use of colour, light and texture. Presented in two parts, the display draws on some of the Chagall’s most acclaimed works while also recalling the artist’s own fascination with theatre, ballet and opera.
Marc Chagall National Museum, Nice / From 10 October 2026 – 24 May 2027
Prehistoric Planet: Dinosaurs – The Immersive Experience
This autumn, the Bassins des Lumières transports visitors 66 million years into the past with a spectacular new experience inspired by Apple TV’s acclaimed Prehistoric Planet series. Projected across the venue’s vast 360° surfaces, the show brings prehistoric landscapes and creatures to life at monumental scale, from giant pterosaurs and mosasaurs to Velociraptors and the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex. Along the way, scenes of nesting dinosaurs, nocturnal hunts and fossil discoveries reveal both the drama of prehistoric life and the evolutionary connections linking species past and present.
Bassins des Lumières, Bordeaux / 3 October 2026 – 3 January 2027
From the Stage to the Canvas: Artists and Socialites of the Belle Époque
Nice’s glamorous Belle Époque is the focal point of this eye-catching exhibition, which draws on the museum’s vast collections to evoke the city’s cosmopolitan society between 1871 and 1914. Portraits of composers, foreign princesses and renowned performers sit alongside carnival scenes, with particular attention paid to female stars whose international fame brought them levels of independence and influence that were unusual for women of that era. Fashion is another recurring theme, from theatrical costumes and formal dress to the emergence of haute couture.
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice, Nice / Through 4 April 2027