At the weekend, over 20,000 people flocked to the opening of the Kanal - Centre Pompidou, an offshoot of Paris’s iconic art museum, housed in a vast warehouse in the Belgian capital.
The brand new Kanal-Centre Pompidou modern art museum, built in a former Citroën warehouse -- an imposing 38,000-square-metre ‘glass cathedral’ Art Deco building -- is currently showing hundreds of works on loan from the Paris Pompidou Centre, one of the world's leading collections of 20th and 21st century art.
The French Culture Minister Françoise Nyssen presided over the inauguration ceremony on Friday.
Plus de 20.000 visiteurs à Kanal ce weekend. "Cela dépasse toutes les espérances", disent les organisateurs. #kanal #kanalbrut #bruxelles @lesoir pic.twitter.com/jOAVr8DWec
— maxbierme (@mbierme) 6 May 2018
“The ambition of Kanal-Centre Pompidou is to offer a centre of culture and exchange open to all, to put the creative scene of Brussels in the limelight, and to contribute to the capital’s cultural appeal,” the museum states on its website.
The new museum will host several exhibitions until June next year, mixing visual arts, design, architecture and major installations and creations by Brussels-based artists, as well as performing arts. After renovations, the space will house a permanent museum of modern and contemporary art, set to open in 2022.
Il est midi 5 mai KANAL est ouvert! Bravo @yvesgoldstein!!!! #kanal #kanalbrut #art #brussels pic.twitter.com/t8GFlEY8VK
— Séverine Provost (@severineprovost) 5 May 2018
Over the next ten years, Kanal-Centre Pompidou will be run as a partnership between the Pompidou Centre, the Bruxelles-Capital region and the Kanal Foundation.
This is the second time the Pompidou centre has launched a museum outside France's borders. The first opened in Malaga in Spain in 2015; another is planned in Shanghai, China in 2019.
