19 – 22 October 2026 | Bonhams 6 avenue Hoche 75008 Paris
Paris – From 19 to 22 October, Bonhams will host, in its Avenue Hoche galleries, a selection of works by Louis Cane (1943-2024), one of the leading figures of contemporary French art and a prominent member of the Supports/Surfaces movement.
Bringing together a distinctive selection of around twenty works, the exhibition traces Louis Cane's artistic journey, from his radical explorations of the painted surface in the late 1960s and 1970s to his later figurative and sculptural works inspired by art history. Throughout his career, Louis Cane challenged conventional approaches to painting, exploring the relationships between canvas, gesture, material and perception. His work is rooted in freedom, colour, joy, poetry and humour, and above all in a deeply creative and life-affirming vision of the world, constantly playing with forms, colours and space.
The exhibition will reveal the fluidity and dialogue between different artistic techniques, taking the colour blue as its guiding thread. This interdisciplinary approach highlights painting, sculpture, decorative objects and furniture.
Giacomo Balsamo, Vice President of the Post-War and Contemporary Art Department at Bonhams, commented: "Louis Cane's work stands as a testament to both artistic freedom and intellectual rigour. This exhibition celebrates not only a major figure of contemporary French art, but also an artist whose influence continues to resonate with new generations. We are delighted to welcome visitors to discover this exhibition at Bonhams Paris from 19 to 22 October."
Florence Cane, Louis Cane's daughter, added: "My father would have loved for us to showcase the diversity of his work through this blue colour that meant so much to him. Through this exhibition, I wish to share the values that always guided his work: freedom, colour, joy, poetry and humour, as well as a deeply creative and optimistic vision of life."
Louis Cane created through movement, allowing works to take shape through experimentation, exchange and encounters. From painting to sculpture, from furniture to decorative arts, he moved freely between different worlds. This constant circulation of ideas and forms lies at the heart of his oeuvre and continues to inspire the works presented today.
As a founding member of the Supports/Surfaces movement, Louis Cane contributed to a profound rethinking of painting by dismantling traditional structures and emphasizing the physical properties of the artwork itself. His celebrated Toiles découpées (Cut Canvases) and the Sol/Mur (Floor/Wall) series remain landmarks of post-war European art, while his later return to figuration demonstrated an ongoing dialogue between abstraction and representation.
His work evolved through this spirit of freedom and inquiry until his passing in 2024. Balancing gravity and humour, abstraction and figuration, radicalism and elegance, his works entered the collections of major institutions from the Centre Pompidou to New York's MoMA and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, while exhibitions dedicated to his work have been presented across Europe, the United States and Asia.
About Louis Cane
Born in Beaulieu-sur-Mer on 13 December 1943, Louis Cane first studied at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Nice from 1961 before continuing at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, graduating from the mural painting and fresco department. He subsequently spent a year at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, preparing for the final competition for the Prix de Rome, which took place in 1968.
By the late 1960s, he had established himself as one of the leading figures of Supports/Surfaces, participating in a radical reassessment of painting: the canvas was separated from the stretcher, materials were laid bare and the painted object itself was deconstructed.
Yet from an early stage, while some remained committed to a strictly formalist reading of art, Louis Cane sought another path, focused on colour, space and a more sensual visual experience. This tension would continue to shape his work, pushing painting beyond its traditional frameworks while reactivating, without nostalgia, the long history of painting.
In the mid-1970s, a significant shift occurred. He turned to art history and tradition not as a refuge but as a means of reopening their questions. The Italian Renaissance, architecture and sacred figures became active resources. Brunelleschi, Giotto, Botticelli and Velázquez nourished an imagination in which reference became a material for transformation. He did not quote the past; he reactivated it. It was a way of entering into dialogue with the artists he admired without sanctifying them.
His artistic trajectory was also shaped by deeply personal attachments: the Mediterranean, the South of France, the landscapes of Villefranche-sur-Mer, Beaulieu and Monaco, as well as vegetation, the female form and, always, colour. Architecture, nature, figures and familiar places nourished his work, from memories of cities to the presence of a fig tree or olive tree.
A multidisciplinary artist, Louis Cane never established hierarchies between artistic practices. Painting, sculpture, decorative arts, objects and furniture all belonged to the same creative flow. He moved effortlessly from one medium to another, a quality that now appears as one of the keys to understanding his work. For him, creation was never about stabilising a visual language or repeating a style, but about continually setting it in motion.
Exhibitions and Collections
The first acquisitions of Louis Cane's work by the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris date back to 1973. Today, his works are held in the collections of major international institutions, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, the Kunstmuseum Basel, and the National Museum of Art, Osaka.
By the mid-1970s, Louis Cane had already achieved international institutional recognition. In 1976, solo exhibitions were devoted to his work at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. The following year he participated in Documenta 6 in Kassel, while the newly inaugurated Centre Pompidou presented his first solo exhibition in France.
In 1978, he took part in the Venice Biennale and was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Kunsthalle Bielefeld. This momentum continued with his participation in the Sydney Biennale in 1979 and numerous institutional exhibitions, notably at the Fondation Maeght (1983), the Musée de l'Orangerie (1994), focused on the Nymphéas series, and the MAMAC in Nice (2012).
Entering the 2000s, his work continued to enjoy international visibility, including a major Supports/Surfaces exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), followed by exhibitions at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2000), the Shaanxi History Museum in China (2001), and participation in the group exhibition Recto Verso at the Fondazione Prada in 2015.