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3. 'Euphoria, Art Is in the Air': Inflatable Artworks Fill the Grand Palais with Emotion

A joyful collision of art, play, and reflection, Euphoria, Art Is in the Air transforms Paris’s Grand Palais into an inflatable wonderland. This bold, immersive show proves that air and color can carry meaning just as much as marble or paint.

The Grand Palais is no stranger to reinvention, but this summer it’s lighter, brighter, and more buoyant than ever. The Balloon Museum, led by curator Valentino Catricalà, returns to Paris after the 2022 hit “Pop Air” with a new immersive exhibition: Euphoria, Art Is in the Air. Spanning more than 40,000 square feet, the space is transformed into a vibrant, inflatable world where art literally expands and breathes.

Inflatables, often dismissed as mere entertainment, take center stage here as a serious artistic medium. International contemporary artists present giant installations, floating sculptures, and walk-through environments, inviting visitors to step inside a living, breathing art experience. Walking through Euphoria feels like entering an ecosystem of ideas—shapes swell around you, colors pulse, and textures beg to be touched.

Air becomes the raw material, the narrative thread, and a symbol of energy and impermanence. Each work is playful yet provocative, encouraging reflection on our relationship to space, the environment, and consumer culture. In a world saturated with images and objects, Euphoria shows that art can be accessible, immediate, and critical all at once.

The show draws a clear line to the Pop Art movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg broke down barriers by bringing everyday objects into museums. That spirit of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary is alive here, now expanded into air-filled forms that children and adults alike can appreciate.

With its playful surfaces and monumental scale, Euphoria blends joy with thoughtfulness, proving that even the lightest material can carry heavy meaning. It’s an art form that floats between boundaries—design, architecture, entertainment—and invites us to breathe, to imagine, and to remember that sometimes, the lightest elements wield the greatest power.

The exhibition runs through September 7.