Art in situ is an unexpected encounter — between our cellars and contemporary creation, between shadow and the audacity of form, between the patience that shapes great wines and the swift gesture of the artist.

For several years now, Caves Patriarche has embraced this improbable meeting by welcoming Art in Situ, the travelling contemporary art trail along Burgundy's Route des Grands Crus. For its 2026 edition, ten artists take over our five kilometres of underground galleries, with seventeen works to be discovered along the way.

At the heart of the trail stand the amphorae of Alice Charton. Born in 1996 and trained at the Beaux-Arts in Dijon, the ceramist draws on ancestral craftsmanship to question our contemporary ways of loving. Her pieces — De temps en temps, je ferme les yeux pour mieux habiter ta bouche — settle their organic curves against the stone, like an archaic memory called back to the surface.

To these answers another temporality: the bronze figures of Alessandro Montalbano. A Sicilian sculptor trained at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts, championed by César and awarded the Prix Princesse Grace in 1994, he has lived in southern Burgundy since 2013. With Poisson jamais vu mais qui existe and Éveil, he sets ancient foundry techniques in dialogue with a dreamlike imagination.

The trail then opens to painting. The canvases of Caroline Wheaton — Pinot noir, L'Héroïne, Contemplation — bring their own register, while Florence Lafourcade unfolds her engraved metal pieces — Darkvad'or, Géométrie de l'ombre, Le dernier reflet, Jardin Bleu — hand-pigmented, varnished, somewhere between jewel and stele.

José Aguirre — a sculptor born in London and based in Bresse-sur-Grosne — offers with Cosmos Bleu his cosmic reading of iron worked in fire, heir to totems and obelisks. Sylvie Schepens, an heiress of lyrical abstraction, signs Les raisons de la colère — a large-format work on PVC, its coloured energy held just short of release.

Christophe Faure Fontenille, a self-taught sculptor based in Thiers, presents Chatilles colorées — each piece unique, conceived in resonance with the site, fashioned from reclaimed materials. Odile Bouxirot, trained at the Beaux-Arts in Nancy, exhibits L'Anature 11, where vegetation ablaze with burning hues hovers between figuration and abstraction.

Jean-Yves Gosti closes the trail with Sans Titre 1m53, a monumental sculpture by an artist who "reads in stone" the faces and bodies it conceals, drawing a conversation between the hardness of the material and the depth of feeling.

To these ten visions are added two exceptional mixed-media works — Secret Garden (canvas, mortar-resin-pigment, oil, gold leaf) and Undressedcode (pleated and hardened satin, resin, gold leaf) — pieces of matter and light that carry the conversation further.

Art in Situ rests on a simple idea: to create a space where the human, art and wine meet. To draw art out of its white galleries and bring it face to face with stone, with coolness, with the silence of the cellars — and so renew our gaze on the Burgundian terroir.

Our vaults thus become, for the length of a season, the stage for a dialogue between the centuries and the sensibilities.

To be discovered during your visit to Caves Patriarche, until the end of 2026.