The Normandy Impressionist Festival has just launched a special edition, running to September 27, 2026. This year marks the centenary of Claude Monet’s death in Giverny, where the “father of Impressionism” spent the last 43 years of his life. Claude Monet used his time at Giverny shaping and reflecting on his gardens, treating them like living paintings where plants themselves became his medium.

Monet’s gardens’ shifting light, reflections, and carefully orchestrated planting inspired some of his most experimental works, helping to move painting beyond representation and toward abstraction. The Normandy Impressionist Festival 2026 takes this legacy as its theme, exploring tensions that remain deeply relevant today: intimacy and exposure, openness and enclosure, cultivated landscapes and untamed growth, engagement with the world and inward reflection, nature and artifice. For the first time in its history (the first edition was in 2010), the festival focuses on contemporary art, featuring over 70 projects across 43 cities in Normandy. And as the festival director, Philippe Platel says, this year’s event “brings together an international community of talents who will tell us about what they owe to Monet’s work.” The program is anchored along the Seine suggesting “art trails” that you can drive or take public transportation, connecting Le Havre, Honfleur, Rouen, Caen and Vernon.

The 2026 festival includes renowned international masters, alongside emerging talents, with a lineup featuring Ai Weiwei’s impressive “Waterlillies” painting made entirely of lego, the immersive fog sculptures of Fujiko Nakaya, paintings made of mud from the gardens of Monet’s Giverny by Lionel Sabatté, delicate “tapestries” made from roots by Diana Scherer and the kinetic installations of Studio Drift, where art, technology, and movement beautifully illustrate the festival’s theme, "A Possible Garden." Here are a few of the many highlights at the 2026 festival.

Studio Drift “Meadow, jardin suspendu,” Rouen

In Église Sainte-Croix-des-Pelletiers a disused chruch, Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta of Studio Drift present a suspended field of mechanical “flowers” that mimic the gentle movement of wild grasses and flowers. Light, motion and delicate mechanical systems bring the installation to life, creating the impression of a hovering meadow that shifts like a natural breeze. The work transforms the space into a quiet, immersive landscape.

Sarah Moon “D’après nature,” Centre photographique Rouen Normandie

Sarah Moon, known as the greatest living French photographer, was a fashion model in the 1960s, before turning to photography in the 1970s. Like Monet, she returns repeatedly to natural subjects: landscapes, water, vegetation but instead of clarity, she embraces blur, fading light, and fragmentation. Where Monet dissolves form through shifting light and brushwork, Moon does so through photography, creating images that feel unstable, fleeting, and more like memory than document.

Janaína Tschäpe, Paintings, Aître Saint-Maclou, Rouen

Inspired by the rhythms of water, plant life and the natural world, Brazilian artist Janaína Tschäpe’s work is characterised by softened contours and flowing color palettes that evoke movement and change. On show at a medieval ossuary (burial ground), her paintings are less about capturing reality than conveying a sense of place and emotion, drawing comparisons with Claude Monet’s exploration of light, landscape and atmosphere. Next month, Janaína Tschäpe will also have her first UK solo show June 13 -September 13, 2026, at Hastings Contemporary.

Ange Leccia, “Aller et venir de lumière,” l’Abbaye, Saint-Martin-de-Boscherville

This mesmerising video installation explores the movement of light across water and landscape. Projected within an historic abbey and using footage of Monet in his gardens, the work creates a meditative dialogue between natural rhythms, memory and the passage of time.

Lionel Sabatté “The Memory of Silt, a tribute to Claude Monet,” Musée Blanche Hoschedté-Monet

Nominated for the 2025 Marcel Duchamp Prize, Lionel Sabatté is known for transforming reclaimed and organic materials into works that explore memory, time, and transformation. Working with everything from wood and stone to dust, sediment, and found objects, he creates sculptures and installations that reveal unexpected beauty in overlooked materials. For the festival project, Sabatté used silt dredged from Monet’s water lily pond at Giverny to create a pigment for a series of screen prints based on archival and contemporary photographs. Drawing directly from the physical substance of the garden itself, the works are a direct connection to Monet’s legacy and the landscape that inspired some of his most celebrated paintings.

Cai Guo-Qiangai “Radiance of Spring,” Mont-Saint-Michel Abbaye

For the preview of the Impressionist festival, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang thrilled the crowd with a live creation of one of his famous gunpowder paintings. Visitors can see the result alongside a number of other works he created in the runup to the festival. These new works can be viewed in the Mont-Saint-Michel Abbaye. Cai Guo-Qiang is well known for his large-scale works made using gunpowder, fireworks, and carefully staged explosions. Working with both control and chance, he creates images formed by burn marks, smoke traces, and bursts of color, turning an explosive material into a means of making images rather than destroying them. In Radiance of Spring, which draws on Monet’s gardens at Giverny, these volatile effects suggest changing light and atmosphere, echoing the Impressionist focus on fleeting moments and perception.

Mika Ninagawa “Floraison Sauvage,” Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen

Japanese photographer and director Mika Ninagawa’s Floraison Sauvage projects vivid floral imagery across the exterior façade of one of the world’s most beautiful cathedrals, interwoven with images of people in motion. The Gothic stonework becomes a shifting surface of color, bodies, and blossoms, briefly animating the building into a layered, luminous composition of nature and human presence.

Diana Scherer “The Light in the Nets,” Église Saint-Nicolas de Caen

A series of “tapestries” made from plant roots form an intriguing installation in an ancient former church and feel especially resonant given the famous Bayeux Tapestry nearby. The roots have been forced to grown in a certain way to create patterns on the resulting lacey textiles. The work by Dutch artist Diana Scherer can be seen as similar to Claude Monet’s gardens, in its focus on a carefully composed, garden-like environment where nature, light, and perception are shaped through design but still allowed to develop in unpredictable ways.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot “Points de Suspension,” Frac Normandie

Sculptor and musician, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot created a site-specific installation featuring eight swings and bells on a floor of recycled clear glass pieces from local factories, in the courtyard of FRAC Caen, the “city of one hundred bells.” The church bells chime when the swings are in motion and upstairs you can see yourself upside down on the swings downstairs, in a video recording taken 15 minutes earlier. The work’s appearance, especially the glass floor changes with the light, creating an environment that is experienced over time rather than seen as a single image, a connection to Claude Monet’s interest in light, atmosphere and changing perception through repetition. With the glass pieces on the floor, the viewer can imagine a pebbled beach and Monet’s many paintings at the seaside.

Julien des Monstiers “Pink, orange, red sun,” Musée Eugène Boudin, Honfleur

Award-winning French painter Julien des Monstiers is known for bold, expressive works that rework landscape and classical motifs through layered color and gesture. His “Pink, Orange, Red Sun,” shown at the Musée Eugène Boudin in Honfleur, was developed in connection with his residency at La Ferme Saint Siméon hotel in Honfleur, where he followed in the footsteps of the many Impressionist painters (Monet, Courbet, Sisley, Corot and Boudin) who stayed there.

Fujiko Nakaya “Fog Tree #07031,” Jardin des Personnalités, Honfleur

Pioneer of installation and video art in Japan, Fujiko Nakaya opened Japan’s first video art gallery in Tokyo in 1980 and has collaborated with leading artists and choreographers, including Trisha Brown, Robert Rauschenberg, and Bill Viola. In 1970, she created the world’s first fog sculpture for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, launching a practice of immersive fog installations that she continues today. Her fog sculpture, in the park in Honfleur where Monet learned to paint trees, provides both a welcome relief from the heat and an ethereal experience for the viewer as the fog wafts through the leaves of the poplar tree creating beautiful, delicate patterns.

Noémie Goudal “The Story of Fixity” Le Portique – Regional Centre for Contemporary Art, Le Havre

At Le Portique Regional Centre for Contemporary Art in Le Havre, Noémie Goudal’s The Story of Fixity presents staged, physically built landscapes that slowly shift or break apart as you look at them. The works are constructed as real 3D sets and then filmed as 2D video pieces, using photography and projection to create a sense of unstable depth.

Ai Weiwei “Water Lilies” and Monet Exhibition, MuMa – Musée d’art moderne, Le Havre

Ai Weiwei’s “Waterlilies,” made from 650,000 pieces of lego, is both an homage to Claude Monet and to his father, Ai Qing, a well known poet who had studied art in France in the early 1930s. From a distance, the 15-meter long work is a remarkable take on Monet’s famous waterlily paintings with their shimmering blue, pink and green flowers. It’s only when you get close that you can see the intricate mosaic of tiny lego pieces. You’ll also notice the black rectangular section on the right, a reference to the cave Ai Weiwei's family lived in during their exile in northern China in the 1960s and 1970s. Alongside Ai Weiwei’s work is an exhibition of early work by Monet who spent his childhood and teenage years in Le Havre. His early caricatures are here, some never exhibited publicly, as well as three paintings that Monet donated to the city.