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Villa Medici celebrates 10 years of the Art Club exhibition cycle this year and invites visual artist Pol Taburet to present his latest project, Paranoia as a Method, from May 16 to July 15, 2026.
The exhibition Paranoia as a Method presents an unprecedented collection of sculptures, drawings, and large-format paintings created during his residency at Villa Medici last March and April. Populated by often hybrid figures, on the borderline between human and animal, Pol Taburet’s works — frequently marked by unease and alienation — evoke states of transition between life and death. Instinctively, he discovers his forms and their meanings through the act of creating them, endowing his work with a diffuse and deeply animated spiritual dimension.
Every year, the Art Club program, directed since 2016 by independent curator Pier Paolo Pancotto, invites one or more international visual artists to take over the historic spaces of Villa Medici and exhibit their most recent work in the Villa’s gardens, loggias, plaster cast gallery, and salons.
After the recent invitations extended to Eva Jospin (2025), Guglielmo Castelli (2024), Caroline Mesquita (2023), and Giuseppe Penone (2022), it is the turn of visual artist Pol Taburet to present his work for the 40th Art Club.
The writer Matthieu Peck turns his gaze to this new production:
“Some of the most fearsome barbed wire is primarily mental. It is there, lodged in our perceptions, sharpened to the point of tightening the walls around us. It is those fleeting yet relentless thoughts, a law unto themselves, that precede our movements and remind us of the great mechanism of time. Getting up, taking a shower, breakfast, perhaps a walk: all seemingly trivial actions that are capable, without warning, of turning against us. Where are we? In the middle of a day that has gone wrong, or that never really started right. Spaces close in despite themselves. Something muffled accompanies all this, without ever naming itself. Existence, once again, has not asked you for your opinion.
In this new series, created specially for Villa Medici, Pol Taburet turns these psychoses into a systematic disruption – a rigorous and exhausting way of inhabiting the world when you no longer trust it. Colors emerge and then fade. Beings are split in two yet remain single. Anxiety here is a discipline, suspicion a way of composing, until the day comes to an end – and everything starts again.”
Pol Taburet
Pol Taburet, born in 1997, lives and works in Paris.
Pol Taburet obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy. Recent solo exhibitions include Cahiers d’Art, Paris (2025) ; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Madrid (2025) ; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2025) ; Longlati Foundation, Shanghai (2024) ; SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation, Seoul (2024); Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2024); Pivô, São Paulo (2023); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2023); Balice Hertling, Paris (2022); C L E A R I N G, Los Angeles (2021).
His work has been shown in group exhibitions at the 36th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (2025); SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation, Seoul (2024); Collection Lambert, Avignon (2024); Église...
Pier Paolo Pancotto
Pier Paolo Pancotto is an independent curator and author of the exhibition programme Art Club, Académie de France à Rome, Villa Medici (2016-present). He has curated, among others, the exhibition Fortezzuola (Museo Pietro Canonica, Rome, 2016-18), a series of exhibitions at La Fondazione, Rome (2019-2021) and exhibition projects at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Mairie du 4ème, Paris; Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London; National Gallery of Art, Tirana; Lateral Art Space, Cluj; Kahan Foundation, Vienna-Budapest; National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome; H. C. Andersen Museum, Rome; Carlo Bilotti Museum, Rome; Villa Torlonia Museums, Rome; Salone Margherita, Rome; Casa Scatturin, Venice; Palazzo Dolfin Manin, Venice; Correr Museum, Venice; Fortuny Museum, Venice; Casa Goldoni,...
Practical information
Guided tour ticket from Villa Medici with access to exhibitions: €14 full price / €11 reduced price / Free on condition
Guided tour of the gardens, the historic apartments of Villa Medici and the works of Pol Taburet (duration: 1h).
Tour times can be found on the Tours page.
Works by Pol Taburet are accessible only on the guided tour.
Acknowledgments
Hannah and Alexander Kudlich
Matthieu Peck
Special thanks to the Società delle Api for hosting the artist as part of its residency program in Rome.
