Cool design and wild art on a city break in Metz

At the Centre Pompidou-Metz a six-metre skeleton of a domestic cat called Felix anchors Dimanche Sans Fin, an exhibition curated by Maurizio Cattelan that brings together more than 400 works from Paris’s Centre Pompidou, which closed for a five-year renovation last October.

The show imagines different takes on a “day of rest,” from Picasso’s Little Girl Jumping Rope to Max Ernst’s King Playing with the Queen, while Cattelan’s Shadow depicts his mother hiding in a fridge. Zoé Stillpass, Cattelan’s co-curator, says: "The banana exhibit, which makes you question the idea of ‘the masterpiece’ and why we give value to something, has a room to itself here." The Pompidou-Metz building itself is striking.

Opened in 2010 and designed by Shigeru Ban, it takes inspiration from a Chinese bamboo-woven hat, with a hexagonal lattice of laminated wood and a draped white fibreglass roof, and occupies a wide open space that was once a Roman amphitheatre.

France, Metz

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