Our new miniseries rounding up the best summer exhibitions along the French Riviera starts in Nice where Matisse and Dali meet environmentalists and ocean photographers.
Every year, art life on the French Riviera reaches a fever pitch in summer. Lovers of the performing arts are plenty busy attending at least a few of the over 450 arts events in 157 communities all over the coastal region in this 30-year-anniversary edition of Soirées Estivales which runs through late August. But those who prefer quiet contemplation of fine museum and gallery art are well served, too.
This trilogy is going to showcase three completely different approaches to summer culture along the Riviera: With Nice’s democratic abundance, Monaco’s luxury-wrapped intellectualism, and Cannes’ cultural eclecticism, there is something for everyone. Enjoy!
PART 1: NICE
Although Nice is filled to (and beyond) capacity in summer, one great way to escape the masses is by visiting some of the dozens of exhibitions offered in all four corners of the city. And mayor Christian Estrosi is nothing if not ambitious: only the most illustrious artists will do. Fortunately, there is no shortage of maestri who chose the Azurean capital as their favourite spot to paint.
The sixth edition of the Biennale des Arts, first established in 2013, has now settled into a curious new rhythm – technically a triennial, yet stubbornly clinging to its original “biennale” moniker. This defiant naming quirk aside, the event remains a highlight of the cultural calendar, evolving to match the city’s changing priorities toward luxury tourism. Artistic excellence and big names are therefore de rigueur.
This year, dedicated to all things ocean, Nice has plunged into the ocean theme with enthusiasm. The 2025 Biennale des Arts et de l’Océan – Année de la Mer pays homage to the United Nations Ocean Conference which took place in June. No less than eleven exhibitions across the city celebrate the Big Blue but the artistic showdown does not stop there. Countless other exhibitions complement these. Below is a small selection of the highlights.
Laurent Ballesta: Mers et Mystères | Musée de la Photographie Charles Nègre | Through 28 September 2025
As one of the highlights, celebrated underwater photographer Laurent Ballesta’s exhibition “Mers et Mystères“ plunges the viewer into a marine world charged with strangeness and intensity. Fifty-three photographs capture scenes rarely seen: gardens of ice beneath the Adélie Sea, a Pacific atoll swirling with sharks during the spawning of groupers, and the deep Mediterranean rendered in surreal detail. Shapes dissolve into colour, stillness pulses with life, and scale becomes elusive. Each image draws the eye into a suspended reality where movement, texture, and light take on unfamiliar weight. The exhibition unfolds as a sensory encounter, composed with the discipline of a scientist and the instincts of a visual poet.
Artists’ collective: “Becoming Ocean: a social conversation about the Ocean” | Villa Arson | Through 24 August 2025
For decades, artists have acted as translators between the planet’s shifting pulse and our human senses, giving shape to climate change through stories rooted in nature’s own language. Moving beyond galleries, they collaborate with scientists and policymakers to invent new gestures that challenge the legacies of colonial exploitation. In Becoming Ocean, more than 20 international contemporary artists examine humanity’s complex relationship with the sea and invite us to join this unfolding movement, where ancient oceanic myths resurface and creative acts become a vital call to rethink our connection with the living world through critical and documentary approaches as well as more sensory, poetic, or speculative expressions.
With Anna María Millán, Roman Bayarri, Ville Haimala, Franziska Aigner and Dan Bodan
Sea Lovers, 2020
Single-channel video installation, color, sound
19 min 40 sec
Commissioned by TBA21–Academy
Still: Courtesy the artist
Matisse, Méditerranée(s) | Musée Matisse | Through 8 September 2025
“I who am a man from the North, it’s the Mediterranean that struck me most,” Henri Matisse once confided, and the transformation shows in every brushstroke. This summer’s exhibition at the eponymous museum traces the artist’s metamorphosis from cautious northern sensibilities to the colour-saturated canvases that secured his artistic immortality. The show reads like a geographical love affair, tracking how Mediterranean light didn’t just change Matisse’s palette but rewired his entire artistic sensibility. The museum’s intimate setting allows visitors to witness this evolution close-up, from tentative early works to the confident, sun-drunk masterpieces that still stop conversations. It is a reminder that sometimes the most profound artistic revolutions begin with a simple change of address.
Matisse Méditerrannée(S) du 07 mai au 07 septembre 2025
Salvador Dalí, Divines Créatures | Espace Lympia | 19 July – 23 November 2025
The port district welcomes pure surrealist theatre this summer when Espace culturel départemental Lympia becomes home to 96 works exploring Dalí’s fantastical menagerie. This enigmatic Divine Creatures exhibition promises to unleash the irrational creatures that populated the Spanish master’s imagination throughout his career. From melting elephants to morphing insects, Dalí’s bestiary defied natural law with characteristic audacity. The harbour setting adds an appropriately dreamlike quality to the experience, as visitors encounter these impossible beings against the backdrop of Nice’s working port. It’s the kind of exhibition that makes you question the reliability of your own eyes, which is precisely what Dalí intended.
Raoul Dufy, the Miracle of the Imagination | Musée des Beaux Arts | Through 28 September 2025
Raoul Dufy’s exhibition unfolds as a quiet revelation of his visual intelligence. Inspired early by Matisse’s luxurious colour explorations and grounded by Cézanne’s structural clarity, Dufy refined a pictorial voice that blossomed in his studio in Vence. His canvases traverse Normandy, Provence and the Mediterranean coast, where Nice held a special place: arriving there in the mid‑1920s, he became utterly entranced by the shimmering, crystalline quality of Mediterranean light, famously declared that “light is the soul of colour,” and let that light define his palette in works such as La terrasse à Nice painted in 1940. Alongside paintings, the exhibition includes textile designs, prints and ceramics, revealing a practice that consistently sought to materialise the fleeting and the joyful. Every piece reflects his lifelong pursuit of what he called “the miracle of the imagination.”
Des Préhistoriques à la Plage! | Musée Terra Amata | Through September 28, 2025
Interested in a change of gear, from fine art to prehistoric science? Four hundred thousand years ago, Terra Amata lay where Nice now stands, but the Mediterranean Sea reached 12 metres higher, reshaping the coastline completely. Early humanoids made their camps on this shifting shore, surrounded by landscapes teeming with elephants, buffalos, and other megafauna. Flint tools crafted from beach pebbles, shell ornaments, and harpoons testify to their resourcefulness and intimate knowledge of the sea’s bounty. The exhibition Des Préhistoriques à la Plage! captures this extraordinary moment when humans first adapted to a dynamic, wild Mediterranean, where rising tides and roaming giants shaped survival, creativity, and the first dialogue between humanity and the ocean. It is a vivid encounter with the deep past beneath the modern city’s streets, connected by the fossilized footprint of one of those humanoids on display.
Crédit : Atelier Lemayeur Alunni
These seven exhibitions represent merely the tip of Nice’s cultural iceberg this summer… a city where every corner seems to harbor another gallery, a different artist’s vision, an inexhaustible dialogue between human creativity and the Mediterranean’s eternal pull. Each venue promises unexpected discoveries, quiet moments of contemplation, and its own particular way of seeing the world anew. The real treasure, perhaps, lies not in any single exhibition but in the cumulative effect of wandering through this landscape of imagination, where every museum visit becomes another thread in the rich tapestry of cultural memory that makes Nice, even in the height of summer’s crowds, feel like a secret worth keeping.
“Nice is an oasis by the sea, with forests of mimosas and palm trees, and there are Russian and English princes who fight with flowers. One day, I, too, will go to Nice, when I am young.”
— Romain Gary, La Vie devant soi
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
Lead image by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash (cropped); all other images as credited
PWI198893 The Red Beach, Collioure, Summer 1905 (oil on canvas) by Matisse, Henri (1869-1954); 33×41 cm; Private Collection; (add.info.: Painting by Henri Matisse); © Peter Willi; © Succession H. Matisse.
Henri Matisse, La Plage rouge, 1905
Huile sur toile, 33 × 41 cm
Collection particulière
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