The Normandy Impressionist Festival returns for its 6th edition from May 29 to September 27, 2026!
Building on the success of its record-breaking 2024 edition, which attracted over 2 million visitors, the Normandy Impressionist Festival returns from May 29 to September 27, 2026, for its 6th edition.
The year 2026 marks a major moment in art history: the centenary of Claude Monet's death in Giverny. For forty-three years, Monet shaped his garden as a living work of art, composed with botanical touches, attentive to light, water, and the metamorphoses of living things. This garden, both real and dreamlike, helped propel his painting towards abstraction and pave the way for modernity.
This 2026 edition will be a celebration of this theme, which continues to explore universal questions: "a possible garden." “Monet in his garden, he is the one on the front line.” Haraway’s theories are based on this collaboration, this “working with,” between several living species—human, animal, and plant—in a garden, and imbue it with a political and ethical dimension. Giverny is the place where Monet works with, with light, with water, with the transformation of flora, and accepts the disquiet between these different living and fluctuating elements. He “stays with the disquiet,” Haraway would say.
More than ever, in 2026, cultivating one’s garden becomes an act of resistance. The gardens of Honfleur, where the young Monet learned to paint the atmosphere, now offer a unique landscape in the face of the global economy penetrating the Seine estuary. This Seine, which further downstream, at Rouen, then Vernon and Giverny, has seen all kinds of changes, even more industrial in the 19th century than today, will be the stage for spectacular artistic projects.
The entire Normandy region will host over 70 projects, all part of a decidedly contemporary art trail, presented in a variety of formats: exhibitions, live performances, public art installations, multidisciplinary creations, educational projects, and tourist routes. These diverse offerings engage with the Impressionist legacy while asserting a distinctly contemporary artistic voice.
Leading figures from the international and French art scenes will be featured alongside the most inventive artists of the new generation: Ai Weiwei, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Fujiko Nakaya, Jacques Perconte, Julien des Monstiers, Lionel Sabatté, Mika Ninagawa, Noémie Goudal, Sarah Moon, Studio Drift, and Tanja Smeets, among others.
Normandie Impressionniste 2026 invites visitors to explore a dynamic garden, a space for experiences, encounters, and fresh perspectives on landscape and art.