Centre Pompidou-Metz opens Seraphine Louis. From Senlis, Without Rival on 31 October 2026, the first major international retrospective devoted to the self-taught French painter known as Seraphine de Senlis. The show gathers more than 90 works, nearly all of the roughly 100 paintings recorded from her hand, and runs in Gallery 2 until 12 April 2027. A public opening takes place on the evening of Friday 30 October.

Seraphine Louis was born in 1864 and orphaned at seven. She worked as a domestic servant for most of her life in Senlis and only began painting at 41, developing a visionary, densely patterned world of leaves, fruit, flowers and staring eyes, painted with Ripolin industrial house paint on canvases laid on the floor or propped upright. Her work was discovered by the German collector and critic Wilhelm Uhde, who enabled her to work on ambitious formats shortly before her death in an asylum in 1942.

The exhibition opens with six giant canvases from 1928 to 1930, lent by the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Senlis museum and the Musee Maillol, and brings together more than eighty works in all. Curated by Elia Biezunski, the show sets out to lift Louis out of the narrow label of naive art and place her back within modernity, reading her work through its materiality, its spirituality and its position between ornament, symbolism and post-impressionism. Archives and films explain her process, and a large biographical section closes the visit.

The museum presents the show as the first retrospective of this scale devoted to the artist, following its recent monographs on singular figures such as Eva Aeppli and Suzanne Valadon. In Senlis itself, the town museum will keep her works on view through a video-mapping presentation, In Seraphine's Hands, before mounting its own exhibition, 1927-2027: Senlis Exhibits Seraphine, once the Metz paintings return in May 2027. Admission in Metz is 7 to 14 euros, free for visitors under 26.