Installation View: Youssef Nabil, To Dream Again, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 19 May - 13 September 2026. Courtesy of Musée d'Orsay. Photography by Allison Bellido Espichan.
Youssef Nabil's solo exhibition To Dream Again is on view at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Curated by Sylvain Amic and Nicolas Gausserand, it marks the first solo exhibition at the museum by an Arab artist, and the first by an African artist.
Since the 1990s, Nabil has built a body of work with a distinct visual identity, deeply shaped by his first encounter with the Musée d'Orsay in 1992. Now the first living artist to take over the museum's Orientalist gallery, Nabil places his work in dialogue with the Orientalist and Symbolist masters who have inspired him—among them Puvis de Chavannes and Odilon Redon. His hand-colored black and white silver gelatin prints evoke a fantasized Egypt of childhood and a borderless, idealized Mediterranean, where warm tones and refined blues and whites give shape to a sensual, consensual Orient free of prohibition. Tracing a chronological journey in five stages—from 19th-century expedition photography to the artist's youth, his formative encounter with the museum, the intersecting identities of East and West, and finally his work in film—the exhibition weaves themes of dream, exile, rebirth, and melancholy across transhistorical echoes.
The exhibition is on view through 13 September 2026.
Visit the Musée d'Orsay website for more information.
