At Paris’s Palais de Tokyo this fall, perfume finally takes its place in the contemporary art canon. From October 29 to November 23, 2025, “Perfume, Sculpture of the Invisible – 30 Years of Artistic Creation by Francis Kurkdjian” transforms the Saut du Loup space into an immersive, multisensory landscape where fragrance behaves like light, sound, and sculpture. Curated by Jérôme Neutres, the exhibition traces three decades of olfactory experimentation by Francis Kurkdjian, the perfumer and artist behind Maison Francis Kurkdjian, whose work has long blurred the lines between luxury fragrance, conceptual installation, and performance.
For Neutres, showing Kurkdjian at Palais de Tokyo is both a curatorial risk and a necessary correction. “Perfume, Sculpture of the Invisible offers an unprecedented conversation between fragrance and other forms of expression such as video, photography and music,” he notes. “These creations and environments, which activate the sense of smell, are exceptional because they make you smell ideas and emotions.”
In his view, the show “consecrates the artistic aspect of the perfumer’s work” and challenges the cliché of the “nose in a white coat” whose purpose is simply to create a commercial “juice.”
An Olfactory Promenade Through Space and Time
Francis Kurkdjian, ©Laurent Humbert.
Conceived as an “olfactory promenade,” the exhibition invites visitors to smell, see, and listen their way through more than ten key “movements” in Kurkdjian’s practice. Fragrance becomes the common thread, diffused in the air, delivered via automatic devices, or offered on scent blotters that visitors can carry with them like portable fragments of the show.
Rather than focusing on bottles and branding, “Perfume, Sculpture of the Invisible” explores how scent can structure space and choreograph experience. Kurkdjian describes perfume as an art of space—“it spreads out, infuses the air, and sometimes resonates with other olfactory compositions”—but also an art of time, unfolding in seconds, minutes, and hours with no possibility of rewinding. Above all, he reminds us, “perfume is invisible… How can it be rendered visible?”
The answer, here, is to stage it alongside video, sound, ceramics, and performance, making olfaction the hidden architecture of the exhibition.
Sparks of Roses and Versailles Nights
Chutt..d’Eau, Château de Versailles, © Nathalie Baetens.
The journey begins in a lane of porcelain rose petals, an echo of Éclats de roses / Sparks of Roses, an installation first presented at West Bund Art & Design in Shanghai and reimagined in Paris. Each bisque porcelain rose, handcrafted by artisans of the historic Manufacture de Sèvres, has been fired for porosity and infused with scent, perched on brushed brass stems in a delicate, cinematic scenography by Cyril Teste and Nina Chalot.
It’s a subtle but potent statement: craftsmanship, material research, and fragrance are given equal weight.
Nearby, “Le roi danse / The King is Dancing” evokes one of Kurkdjian’s legendary nocturnal happenings in the gardens of Versailles. In 2008, the perfumer filled the Ballroom Grove with the glow of 600 double-wick candles and a powdery violet fragrance. At Palais de Tokyo, visitors are enveloped by a scented 360-degree environment, LEDs recalling the original rings of candlelight and the baroque theatre of the Sun King’s fêtes.
Archival videos of earlier Versailles projects—scented bubbles, perfumed fountains, and steel roses breathing fragrance—situate the work within a long-running investigation of how olfaction can transform historic architecture into living, ephemeral sculpture.
Breaking with “Smelling Good”
L’odeur de l’argent, Sophie Calle, Francis Kurkdjian. Courtesy of Francis Kurkdjian.
One of the show’s most quietly radical moments revisits Kurkdjian’s first major artistic commission: “L’odeur de l’argent / The Smell of Money”, created with Sophie Calle and first shown at Fondation Cartier in 2003. Calle asked Kurkdjian to imagine the smell of money, giving him total creative freedom. The resulting composition is, in his words, both “attractive and repulsive,” built on the memory of a well-worn dollar bill: linen-fibre paper, ink, and the grime of constant handling.
Kurkdjian recalls that commission as a turning point: “Faced with this unusual request, I realized that fragrance could never become a true artistic medium until it broke with the aesthetic and hedonistic codes of the commercial perfume industry. That is the condition that must be met if fragrance is to have a legitimate place in museums, despite its intangible nature.”
“I realized that fragrance could never become a true artistic medium until it broke with the aesthetic and hedonistic codes of the commercial perfume industry,”
Francis Kurkdjian
In other words, for perfume to be taken seriously as art, it must be allowed to disturb, challenge, and complicate—not simply seduce.
From Virtual Gardens to Drinkable Fragrance
EDEN, © Hugo Arcier.
If some works re-stage iconic past projects, others push perfume into genuinely new territory. “Eden,” an interactive virtual reality piece created with director Cyril Teste and digital artist Hugo Arcier, equips visitors with VR headsets embedded with a bespoke diffusion system. As participants navigate a virtual plant-world, six fragrances composed by Kurkdjian are released in sync with rustling leaves and damp, earthy environments, collapsing digital image, sound, and smell into a single choreography.
Elsewhere, “L’Or bleu / Blue Gold,” conceived with artist Yann Toma, takes the form of scented drinkable spring water. Presented here via archival images and a fountain, it invites visitors to literally ingest fragrance as “artistic energy,” challenging the idea that perfume must sit on the skin or in the air.
These experiments extend Kurkdjian’s assertion that “our sense of smell is what differentiates us from machines, enabling us to live and therefore exist. It’s intrinsically linked to our humanness.”
Perfume, Music, and the Language of Notes
Francis Kurkdjian x Klaus Mäkelä, © JPH-Clandoeil.
The exhibition also foregrounds Kurkdjian’s rich collaborations with the world of music. In a reconstructed “music lounge,” visitors can revisit “L’essence de la musique / The Essence of Music,” a concert-performance presented at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2022. As cellist Klaus Mäkelä performed Bach’s Cello Suite No. 2, Kurkdjian created a separate olfactory score, composing a fragrance accord for each movement and diffusing them live in the hall.
“Music and fragrance are both connected to the air: music is a vibration of air, and fragrance is conveyed by air,” he explains. “Music and fragrance share the same vocabulary. Both involve scales, notes, harmonies, and compositions… If you take a piano, the size of the keyboard is finite but the range of sounds and styles it can produce is infinite. It’s the same with perfume.”
That shared language is echoed again in recent projects with Katia and Marielle Labèque and the Cocteau/Glass Trilogy, where scent becomes a silent partner to minimalist scores.
Visible Traces of the Invisible
One thousand kilometers landscape, Wan Liya; Courtesy of Francis Kurkdjian.
While much of the exhibition is about smell, several works make the invisible visible. In “Expanded Drops,” Swiss-Canadian photographer Christelle Boulé places droplets of Maison Francis Kurkdjian’s perfumes onto photographic paper to reveal abstract “fingerprints” of each fragrance.
Nearby, a monumental ceramic installation by Chinese artist Wan Liya, Thousands Kilometers Landscapes, translates the house’s signature bottles into an 11-meter frieze of 250 porcelain objects painted with cobalt-blue landscapes inspired by the Song dynasty hand scroll A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains.
These pieces, along with video documentation of bubbles, fountains, and scented snow, underscore a key theme: perfume can be a powerful generator of images, objects, and narratives, even when we cannot see it. They also highlight the extended artistic ecosystem around the Maison, from ceramics and photography to kinetic sculpture.
The Alchemy of the Senses: Baccarat Rouge 540 Reimagined
Anne-Sophie Pic x Francis Kurkdjian_2021; Courtesy of Francis Kurkdjian.
The exhibition culminates in “The Alchemy of the Senses,” a new immersive installation inspired by Maison Francis Kurkdjian’s cult fragrance Baccarat Rouge 540 and developed with a constellation of longtime collaborators: filmmaker Cyril Teste, kinetic artist Elias Crespin, chef Anne-Sophie Pic, composer David Chalmin, and pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque.
Visitors begin with a gastronomic gesture—a creation by Pic that translates the fragrance’s complex architecture into taste—before entering a pavilion where light shifts from molten gold to deep red. At its center, a new millésime edition of Baccarat Rouge 540 is presented in a sculpted red crystal bottle, crowned by a kinetic work by Crespin, while Chalmin’s score, interpreted by the Labèque sisters, envelops the space.
Designed as a “total sensory experience” touching hearing, sight, taste, touch, and smell, the piece makes explicit what runs through the entire show: perfume as a collaborative, cross-disciplinary medium.
Conversations, Not Collaborations
Trilogie-Cocteau_01 © JPH-Clandoeil.
For Marc Chaya, CEO and co-founder of Maison Francis Kurkdjian, the exhibition is also a statement about authorship and authenticity in a luxury landscape increasingly populated by surface-level artist tie-ins. “Francis Kurkdjian and I never talk about ‘collaborations,’ but of ‘conversations,’” he says. “Maison Francis Kurkdjian’s artistic dimension is not contrived in any way, it is an authentic, voluntary process.”
Chaya’s own story—growing up in Lebanon, finding refuge from war in art and fragrance—underscores why he sees perfume as belonging in the same space as painting, film, and music. “When I smell a perfume composed with sensitivity and intelligence, I feel the same sense of harmony that I experience when listening to music or gazing at a painting,” he reflects.
“When I smell a perfume composed with sensitivity and intelligence, I feel the same sense of harmony that I experience when listening to music or gazing at a painting,”
Marc Chaya
That conviction, paired with his advocacy around copyright and recognition, frames the exhibition as both celebration and quiet manifesto.
A Mental Workshop at Palais de Tokyo
Bureau du compositeur; Courtesy of Francis Kurkdjian.
The final chapter of the exhibition invites visitors into a replica of Kurkdjian’s office—“more of a mental workshop than a laboratory,” as the press materials describe it—where books, films, photographs, and archival objects reveal the cultural references behind the scents: Marcel Proust and Françoise Sagan, Coco Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent, Rudolf Nureyev and Maria Callas, even a poster for Le Male, the blockbuster fragrance he composed at 26.
It’s a reminder that, for Kurkdjian, perfume is always in dialogue with other worlds.
“Working with artists helps me satisfy my curiosity about things that are beyond my range of knowledge and skills,” he says. “These encounters have no other purpose than to push me into developing and expanding my own practices.”
At Palais de Tokyo, those expanded practices finally have a museum-scale platform.
For visitors in Paris during the run of Paris’s busy fall season, “Perfume, Sculpture of the Invisible” offers a rare chance to experience perfume not as an accessory, but as a fully fledged artistic medium—shaping space, marking time, and sculpting the air itself.
Practical Information
Courtesy of Francis Kurkdjian and Palais de Tokyo.
“Perfume, Sculpture of the Invisible – 30 Years of Artistic Creation by Francis Kurkdjian”
Palais de Tokyo, Saut du Loup
13, avenue du Président Wilson, 16th arrondissement, Paris
Dates: October 29–November 23, 2025
Hours: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday: 12–10 p.m.; Thursday: 12–midnight; closed Tuesday.
Admission: Free with reservation via franciskurkdjian.com.
