Toutes Les Colonnes N’Ont Pas Un Cœur De Pierre - Céleste Richard-Zimmermann

“Not every column has a stone heart” suggests that at the heart of the monument lie as many stories as there are ways to build them. Conceived as an abandoned stone quarry, the exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo brings together sculptures, bas-reliefs, paintings, and sound art where symbols are overturned, fakes become real, and materials play with the senses.

The great broken column, decapitated and hollow, around which the exhibition unfolds, invites reflection on the processes of transforming monumental forms. Inspired by the history of revolutionary destructions as well as by the mechanisms of reclaiming struggles, it envisions the monument as a space for constructing and circulating narratives, where memory, disappearance and reinvention intertwine.

Stone, plaster, copper, and polystyrene merge, mold, and shed their surfaces to fashion grand statements from humble things. Motifs drawn from the vocabulary of official statuary are displaced and reinterpreted, while discreet marks, graffiti, workshop traces, and signs of alteration reveal the peripheral histories inscribed in the architectures of power.

With her burins, brushes, and scissors, Céleste Richard-Zimmermann questions the capacity of symbols of authority to survive, mutate, or shed their substance, in a subversion of the established order.

This exhibition is organized in collaboration with CEAAC, the Centre européen d’actions artistiques contemporaines in Strasbourg, where it will be presented in 2027.

Céleste Richard-Zimmermann is the recipient of the Friends of Palais de Tokyo Prize 2026–2027.