Exhibition design: The art of staging to sell

This porous boundary between mise en scène and commercial value lies at the heart of what professionals in the field now call exhibition design. A hybrid discipline born of theatre, nourished by architecture and museology, it has established itself as an economic lever as much as an aesthetic one in the world of contemporary art.

01From theatrical origins to the exhibition hall: an acknowledged lineage

The word itself betrays its origins. Skēnographia in ancient Greek referred to perspective painting on the backdrop of the stage — the skēnē — in fifth-century Athenian theatres. Sophocles, it is said, was among its earliest practitioners. Vitruvius, in the first century BC, describes in De Architectura the periaktoi, those rotating triangular prisms that allowed the scenery visible to the audience to be changed swiftly.

This logic of controlled illusion, of the guided gaze, migrated toward the exhibition space in the nineteenth century, when the great universal fairs became open-air scenographic laboratories. The Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace in London, then that of 1889 in Paris — whose Eiffel Tower was as much an installation as an infrastructure — introduced the idea that space itself could be an argument. People came not merely to see objects: they came to live an unprecedented spatial experience.

It was the Bauhaus that, in the 1920s, theorised this transition. László Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius developed there a modular and interactive conception of exhibition space, in which architecture, light and the movement of the visitor were conceived as a coherent system. The Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar in 1923 stands as the most fully realised demonstration of this: for the first time, the exhibition itself was conceived as a total work of art.

02Pontus Hultén and the invention of scenographic narrative

If one name must be retained for having transformed museological scenography into an autonomous cultural narrative, it is that of Pontus Hultén. Founding director of the Centre Pompidou, this polymorphic Swede understood before most of his contemporaries that an exhibition could function like a film — with editing, ellipses, moments of surprise. His major thematic exhibitions, Paris-New York in 1977, then Paris-Berlin (1978) and Paris-Moscou (1979), deliberately broke with chronology in favour of associations of ideas and unexpected confrontations between works.

Scenography there became an intellectual argument: the hanging itself produced meaning. The flexible space of the Centre Pompidou — designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with its moveable partitions and adjustable lighting rails — was made precisely for this. This model influenced generations of curators and set designers, down to the current practices of major institutions such as the Tate Modern or MoMA.

In parallel, another figure redefined the possibilities of the museum arrangement: Lina Bo Bardi. Her São Paulo Museum of Art, the MASP, inaugurated in its definitive form in 1968, proposes a radically anti-hierarchical installation — paintings presented on transparent glass easels, suspended in space, with no labels visible on the front. The visitor can walk around each work, see its reverse, read the captions on the back. The work is not untouchable; it is available. It is a scenographic declaration as much as a political one.

03Light as raw material

To speak of exhibition design without speaking of light is to speak of painting without mentioning colour. Lighting is not a technical accessory — it is the primary vehicle of hierarchy in an exhibition space.

The most radical proof of this is provided by James Turrell, whose work Aten Reign, installed in the rotunda of the Guggenheim in New York in 2013, literally transformed Frank Lloyd Wright into an optical instrument. Shifting LED gradients altered the perceived depth of the central light well, dissolving the architecture into chromaticism. Visitors lay down on the floor to look upward — a posture previously unheard of in a museum.

In a more functional register, major museums have developed extremely precise lighting protocols. The Leonardo da Vinci retrospective at the Louvre in 2019 — one of the most visited exhibitions of recent decades with 1.1 million entries in 17 weeks — used rooms in partial darkness, where manuscripts and paintings were lit individually at different colour temperatures according to the material depicted. The notebooks received raking light to reveal the texture of the paper; the paintings, diffuse light to reduce reflections from the varnish.

This work is now carried out by specialists whose title hovers between lighting designer and scenographic lighting consultant, and whose fees in major institutional exhibitions can represent 8 to 15 percent of the total scenographic production budget.

04Frederick Kiesler and the exhibition as living organism

The history of exhibition design has its forgotten figures, whose rediscovery illuminates current practice. Frederick Kiesler, an Austro-American architect born in 1890, was among the first to articulate explicitly the idea that exhibition space should be a living organism, not a neutral container.

His Raumstadt (City in Space), presented in 1924 in Vienna at the International Exhibition of New Theatre Techniques, was a floating modular structure — an assembly of interconnected platforms, walkways and metal frames — that anticipated by several decades contemporary concerns about participatory scenography. Kiesler wanted to eliminate the wall as a hanging surface, which he conceived as a symbolic boundary between art and spectator.

This intuition finds a contemporary echo in the installations of teamLab, the Japanese collective founded in 2001, whose Borderless exhibition in Tokyo welcomed more than 2.3 million visitors in under a year in 2018. Digital projections spill beyond the walls to invade the floor, the ceiling, the very bodies of the visitors themselves. The boundary between the work and its viewer is deliberately dissolved — precisely what Kiesler had called for with the means available to him at the time.

05When staging becomes a selling point

Scenography does not serve only to convey an aesthetic experience: it produces commercial value. It is in this domain that disputes are most heated, and practices most revealing.

The major auction houses have understood this for a long time. Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips devote growing budgets to the presentation of their pre-sale highlights. The exhibitions preceding the major May and November sales in New York or London are genuine scenographic events: minimalist captions, calculated spacing between works, narrative sequencing between lots. The aim is to create an atmosphere of rarity and urgency.

The same principle applies to commercial galleries. At Hauser & Wirth, whose spaces in London, Zurich, Los Angeles and Somerset have become architectural references, every exhibition is conceived in close collaboration with artists and professional scenographers. The hanging of Louise Bourgeois or Mark Bradford in these spaces is never neutral: the choice of distance between works, the height of the hang, the relationship to natural light — everything contributes to constructing a reading proposition that also shapes the desire to acquire.

Art fairs have developed their own scenographic vocabulary. At Art Basel, the visual distinction between the stands of major galleries — Gagosian, Pace, White Cube — and those of more modest operations is immediately legible. The scenographic budget for a stand in the Main Sector can reach several hundred thousand euros for a week of exhibition. It is a calculated investment: the staging directly conditions how the value of the works on show is perceived.

06The question of meaning: scenography or spectacle?

This power of presentation raises questions to which the art world has not yet found unanimous answers. Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle (1967), had anticipated the risk of a culture in which staging ultimately substitutes itself for content. Brian O'Doherty, in Inside the White Cube (1976), was already denouncing the way in which the exhibition apparatus — even the most minimalist — is never innocent: it constructs a commercial aura around the object on display.

The critique intensified with the emergence of commercial immersive experiences such as Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, several versions of which have toured the world since 2017. These devices, which project works from the public domain onto large surfaces, occupy an ambiguous space: neither scholarly exhibition nor artist's installation, they exploit the cultural recognition of canonical works to produce a sellable spectacle. Several of these operators faced legal proceedings for infringement of neighbouring rights in 2023, revealing the juridical fragility of the model.

Claire Bishop, theorist of participatory art, had already formulated an analogous warning in Artificial Hells in 2012: spectator participation, when over-scripted, can become a form of emotional manipulation that has little to do with artistic experience any longer. Entertainment takes the place of encounter.

07Es Devlin and scenography as thought

Against these potential excesses, practitioners like Es Devlin demonstrate that ambitious scenography can remain in the service of an idea. This British scenographer, trained in theatre and known to the wider public for her monumental concert stages, has produced for institutions such as the Royal Academy and events such as COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 arrangements that make the visitor an actor in the reflection, not a passive consumer.

Her installation Please Feed the Lions for The Shape of Things campaign in 2018 offered a library of phrases collected from the public, rendered in neon in a circular space. The scenography there was the medium of a collective work. It is this usage — staging as the vehicle of a shared thought rather than as a commercial showcase — that represents perhaps the most compelling future for the discipline.

The challenge for the years ahead will be to maintain this rigour even as the tools multiply. Projection mapping, augmented reality, binaural sound devices, the biofabricated materials that Neri Oxman has developed in her research on material ecology — all of this offers unprecedented possibilities. But no technology replaces the fundamental question that every serious exhibition designer must ask before touching a space: what do I want the visitor to understand, to feel, to carry away? The answer to that question is what distinguishes scenography from decoration, and the exhibition from a carnival of sensations.