Quebec City's Riopelle Pavilion Opens, Built Around One Painter

Quebec City's main art museum opens a new building this week, and its whole focus is one artist. The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ), the province's national fine arts museum, opens the Espace Riopelle-Michael Audain Pavilion on October 22, 2026, dedicated to the painter Jean Paul Riopelle.

The building cost C$84 million, about US$61 million, according to The Art Newspaper. That is more than double the budget first set when the project was announced in 2022, the same report says. The Quebec government contributed more than C$40 million. The Jean Paul Riopelle Foundation gave at least C$20 million.

The pavilion is named after Riopelle and Michael Audain, a philanthropist who co-founded the Riopelle Foundation. Audain, along with Yoshiko Karasawa and Pierre Lassonde, donated more than 60 works by Riopelle and his contemporaries for the building. Counting the value of those gifts, Audain's total contribution is more than C$90 million.

The new building is three storeys tall and covers more than 5,000 square metres. It was designed by FABG Architectes, a firm based in Montreal. It has four exhibition spaces, and the largest of them is a circular gallery built around L'Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg (1992), a triptych, meaning a work made of three connected panels. The triptych stretches 40 metres.

Visitors will be able to see the Plains of Abraham, a historic park in Quebec City, and the Saint Lawrence River from inside. Two covered outdoor terraces give people a place to sit and look out. The Quebec government says the opening will feature around 130 paintings, sculptures and works on paper by Riopelle.

The museum has planned four days of celebrations, running from October 22 to 25. The government has called the opening the cultural event of the year.

For the people who will walk through, the pavilion gives Riopelle's work far more room than the museum's existing galleries could offer. For the city, it is also a large public investment, paid for by the province, a foundation and private donors. Whether the building draws the crowds its backers hope for will be clear only once the doors have been open for a while.