2025 ART EXHIBITION AT THE CHÂTEAU DU RIVAU

Surprises at Château du Rivau
The new Modern Art exhibition in the Loire Valley

To discover from March 29th to November 11th, 2025

Gathered together over the last forty years by Patricia Laigneau and her husband Eric, the contemporary art collection presented at Château du Rivau includes paintings, sculptures and photographs, often marked by a touch of humour and a sense of the marvellous. In 2025, over eighty astonishing works will be on display. These works explore historical themes through a scenography inspired by cabinets of curiosities and castle life.

In each room, you can revisit the history of art as reinterpreted by the great artists of our time. The portrait with Valérie Belin, the hunting trophy with Jeff Koons, historical painting with Pierre Ardouvin and ORLAN, and more.

The different themes of the exhibition

The portrait room

In the Beauvau room, portraits of the former lords of Le Rivau stand side by side with those of the current family, photographed by Valérie Belin. Also on display is Julien des Monstier’s painting Jardin de la France, showing the connection between a woman’s body and the River Loire. Delphine Balley’s family portraits are distinguished by their meticulous staging, blending reality and fiction. Her work often explores themes of family memory, rituals and beliefs, giving her works a theatrical and narrative dimension.

The Grand Logis room

Château du Rivau has a heritage collection of taxidermy that has been brought together with contemporary works by artists such as Jeff Koons, Julien Salaud, Art Orienté objet, Marnie Weber, Nicolas Darrot, Fabien Merelle, Karine Bonneval, Patrick van Caeckenbergh, SUN Xue and Martens van den Eyde. In the showcases, the marvellous animals of Christian Gonzenbac, Bruno Pelassy and Julie Legrand come face to face with taxidermy. The shovels by the mischievous Wim Delvoye complete the medieval atmosphere, as the artist highlights the analogy between the shape of the shovel and heraldic coats of arms, while Thibaut Huchard quotes illuminations using tempera and gold leaf.

The Feasting Room

The theme of the meal is explored in this room dedicated to conviviality. Sabine Pigalle’s Le dernier repas and Thomas Wattebled’s Le néant are among the works on show. Jean-François Fourtou’s XXL bees fly over the table set with ancient ceramics from Blois, while the 16th-century fresco is in dialogue with an oil and tempera by Laurent Grasso and an oil by Christian Hidaka that recalls the medieval musicians’ lodge. Still lifes by ChangKi chung and Gilles Barbier revisit the icons of this genre.

The Ladies’ Room

Historical painting is revisited in the Salle des Dames with female portraits of the most famous beauties of the Renaissance, such as a Grace by Cranach but tattooed by Belgian artist Jean-Luc Moerman. ORLAN and Bianca Bondi have created contemporary versions of The Birth of Venus using morphing techniques and chemical reactions. Their works – ORLAN’s lightbox and Bondi’s sculpture – stand alongside Céline Cléron’s Lady with Handkerchiefs revisiting Della Robbia and Gilles Barbier’s Hawaiian ghost. The Mona Lisa is reinterpreted by Ange Leccia and Pierre Ardouvin. Julien des Monstiers freely evokes Raphael’s Lady of the Unicorn. In the fireplace, like the Passion, Carnaval in Orbit, imagined by Sheila Hicks, glows red.

In this room, Katia Bourdarel’s Little Brother questions the male vision of female conquest, while Van Eyck’s Man in the Red Turban has become a Kurdish girl, the resistance fighters against the Islamic State under the brush of British artist David Nicholson.

Art objects have also been contemporised. For example, the art of glass with La promesse by Kim Kotatamalune, gold with the oversized crown by Vincent Olinet, and Celestine, an installation of engraved and enamelled ceramics by the Lamarche-Ovize duo that echoes the albarelli, the decorated pots in grand Renaissance homes. But here, they evoke the tentatric woman.

The study of the Seigneur du Rivau

The sexpartite-vaulted tower, known as the Plantagenet, is typical of Anjou Gothic architecture and evokes the atmosphere of the Seigneur de Beauvau’s study. Here, the lord of the manor kept precious objects brought back from distant travels and curiosities designed to stimulate the imagination and the nascent humanist conscience.

In the foreground is a magnificent 16th-century coat of arms tracing the illustrious lineage of the Beauvau family, builders of Le Rivau. On the wall, the Beauvau coat of arms, a crest in the shape of a boar’s head, is humorously reinterpreted by artist Astrid Mery Sinivassin, recalling their knightly past.

Emblems of humanity, such as vanities, were also part of these studiolos, reminding us of the inexorable passage of time. The spirit of dialogue between art of the past and present inspired the artist Erik Dietman to create a mischievous Memento Mori : L’âme à poil, the Belgian artist Jan Fabre to create Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World), a sphere surmounted by a spine close to the globus cruciger of the Christian tradition and, also in this vein, Pierre Ardouvin’s Tête de loup sortant d’un vase (Wolf’s Head Emerging from a Vase).

The rooms Tribute to Joan of Arc

The epic story of Joan of Arc, which left its mark on Le Rivau, is celebrated through works by Pierre et Gilles, Charles Fréger, Corine Borgnet, Julien Salaud, Julien Serve, Léo Dorfner, Milena Massardier, Violaine Laveaux, Pascal Barret and François Andés.

In the gardens

In the gardens, the surprises continue with Xenomorph (Loire), a large sculpture of a Xenopus laevis frog (a species widely used in scientific research) created from waste collected in the Loire. This work is one of a series of frog sculptures made from waste from major urban rivers, such as the Seine in Paris, the Los Angeles River, the East River in New York and now the Loire.

American artist Bryan Crockett is fascinated by the fact that frogs have no barriers between their bodies and their environment. Frogs breathe through their skin, which makes them highly sensitive to pollution and environmental changes. By creating these oversized frog sculptures, Crockett wants to convey the idea that, like the frog, we too are affected by the contamination of the waters around us.