Festival : Normandie Impressionniste 2026

Description

The Normandie Impressionniste festival returns for its 6th edition from May 29 to September 27, 2026!

Following the success of its record-breaking 2024 edition, which attracted more than 2 million visits, the Normandie Impressionniste festival will return from May 29 to September 27, 2026, for its sixth edition.

The year 2026 marks a major moment in art history: the centenary of Claude Monet’s death in Giverny. Over forty-three years, Monet shaped his garden as a living work of art, composed through plant-based touches, with careful attention to light, water, and the transformations of living matter. This garden, both real and imaginary, helped propel his painting toward abstraction and paved the way for modernity.

This 2026 edition will celebrate a theme that continues to open up to universal questions: “a possible garden.” “Monet in his garden—he himself stands on the front line.” Haraway’s theories are grounded in this collaboration, this “making-with” among multiple living species—human, animal, and plant—within a garden, giving it both political and ethical significance. Giverny is the place where Monet works “with”: with light, with water, with the transformation of flora, embracing the uncertainty between these different living and shifting elements. He “stays with the trouble,” as Haraway would put it.

More than ever, in 2026, cultivating one’s garden becomes an act of resistance. The gardens of Honfleur, where the young Monet learned to paint atmosphere, now offer a distinctive landscape in the face of the global economy entering the Seine estuary. The Seine itself, further upstream in Rouen and then Vernon and Giverny, which witnessed intense industrial activity in the 19th century—more so than today—will become the stage for spectacular artistic proposals.

Across the whole of Normandy, more than 70 projects will be presented as part of a decidedly contemporary trail, expressed through a wide variety of forms: exhibitions, live performances, installations in public spaces, multidisciplinary creations, educational projects, and tourist routes. Each of these initiatives engages in dialogue with the Impressionist legacy while asserting a fully contemporary artistic voice.

Major figures from the international and French art scene will appear alongside some of the most inventive artists of the new generation: Ai Weiwei, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Fujiko Nakaya, Jacques Perconte, Julien des Monstiers, Lionel Sabatté, Mika Ninagawa, Noémie Goudal, Sarah Moon, Studio Drift, and Tanja Smeets, among others.

Normandie Impressionniste 2026 invites visitors to explore a garden in motion—a space for experiences, encounters, and renewed perspectives on landscape and art.

The full program is available at: normandie-impressionniste.fr