The AR(t]CHIPEL festival returns for its fourth edition from 15 October 2026, spreading contemporary and modern art across the Centre-Val de Loire region in a partnership between the region and the Centre Pompidou. This year's edition honours Alexander Calder and Max Ernst, two towering figures of twentieth-century art who lived and worked in the region — 2026 marks fifty years since both artists' deaths, as well as the centenary of Calder's installation in France.

'Calder, au cœur de la France' traces a parcours through the artist's universe in some fifteen exceptional venues across the region. Works by Calder go into dialogue with châteaux, museums, art centres, architecture and landscapes: monumental pieces appear at the châteaux of Chambord, Azay-le-Rideau and Blois, while the fine-arts museums of Orléans, Tours, Chartres and Issoudun, the CCCOD, the Hôtel Goüin in Tours, the Tanneries in Amilly, the Ar[t]senal in Dreux and Calder's own atelier in Saché take part in the tribute.

At the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, 'Max Ernst – De Natura' presents a selection of works from the Centre Pompidou's collections exploring the artist's singular relationship with nature, the living and metamorphosis. Forests, gardens and organic or mineral formations appear less as motifs than as processes in which the outside world merges with the mechanisms of the imagination.

Beyond the two headliners, the festival proposes fourteen exhibitions of contemporary art and the exceptional opening of nearly ninety artists' studios across the region's six departments. AR(t]CHIPEL has been building year by year as the cultural laboratory for Bourges, at the heart of the region, which becomes European Capital of Culture in 2028.