A Sunday at LUMA Arles: lunch, exhibitions and the bookshop

Hi everyone! Shall we talk about LUMA Arles?
Greg and I went on a Sunday, planning to have lunch and see whatever exhibitions were on. We ended up staying for the entire day.

I had already seen the tower in photos hundreds of times, but in real life it is even stranger. Depending on where you stand, it never quite looks the same. Sometimes it shines intensely, sometimes it seems almost grey. I still don't know whether I find it beautiful, but it intrigues me, and that's precisely why I like it.

Arriving at LUMA Arles on a Sunday

Frank Gehry’s tower stands in the middle of the former Parc des Ateliers, but it is only part of the place. There are old industrial buildings, gardens, outdoor artworks and several exhibition spaces. We walked for hours and wandered into almost everything without following much of a route.

I took far too many photographs of the tower, mostly through the trees and from the park. The reflections on the metal and the shifting light worked beautifully with my Fujifilm. I could shoot the same building ten times and come away with ten different images. I had felt something similar while exploring the inside of a duplex at the Cité Radieuse : you understand a building far better once you can actually move through it.

Lunch at the Drum Café

We began with lunch at the Drum Café. The room is enormous, with concrete everywhere and books lining the space. Naturally, before the food had even arrived, I was already studying the covers and type on the shelves.

J’y suis revenue plusieurs mois plus tard, seule cette fois, pour travailler toute une journée au Drum Café. Je vous ferais un article à part pour mieux vous raconter !

The exhibitions we saw that day

After lunch, we saw the David Armstrong exhibition: black-and-white portraits, contact sheets and illuminated images in rooms that were almost completely dark. I loved the rhythm between glowing screens and photographic prints. It is one of the things I enjoy in museums such as Tate Modern in London : you notice the work, but also the way it has been staged and revealed to you.

We also explored Hans Ulrich Obrist’s archive devoted to Maria Lassnig. At first, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of some of the paintings. The bodies are distorted, the colours can feel rather strange, and the work asks you to slow down.

In the end, I stayed in that section for ages. I’ll share much more in a separate post about both exhibitions.

And, inevitably, the bookshop

There was no chance I was leaving without visiting the bookshop. Art and design books are my weakness, especially when a cover has bold colour, confident type and the sort of production that makes you open it before deciding whether you actually need it.

I nearly always buy three or four, although I do try to choose books I’ll genuinely return to. I use them constantly when I’m working on editorial design or art direction. A cover, colour combination or layout can spark an idea I would never have found while staring at a screen.

Is LUMA worth a full day?

Absolutely. We arrived for lunch and a few exhibitions, then walked out at the end of the day wondering where the time had gone. Come without an overly tight plan: there is plenty of walking, and it is very easy to linger in a gallery or the bookshop for much longer than expected.

Places like this inevitably feed into my work. When I’m creating a website for a hotel, restaurant or cultural venue with Minuit d’Orsay, I look for the detail that makes somebody want to walk through the real door: a colour, photograph, typeface or small visual cue that stays with them. If your website still doesn’t capture what people discover when they visit you, you can tell me about your project here.

LUMA Arles
Parc des Ateliers
35 Avenue Victor Hugo, 13200 Arles
Opening times, access and current programme on the official website.