AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER and filmmaker William Klein once said Paris is a city that 'continues to modify itself, to renovate itself'. It's also a place that tends to brood on itself, to ask the broader question of where the city and urban life stand in relation to its inhabitants.
That's the subject of the exhibition Art and the City, which brings the works of 30 young artists to the Luxembourg, a garden in the centre of the French capital created in the 17th century for Marie de Medicis, second wife of King Henri IV.
There is an irony in the choice of venue. The Luxembourg - with its Italianate-style palace and formal gardens, terraces, palm trees, orchards, monuments and statues - is a place where Parisians come to read, jog, lie on the grass and get away from the city without actually leaving it.
But the works of these artists, most born in the 1970s, interrupt their reveries with reminders of what lies not only directly outside the garden's gates, but also further towards the edges of Paris and other cities, places tourists rarely venture into.
The young artists' takes on the city vary from the sombre to the cheeky, but all are far from the picturesque depictions found in kiosks snaking along the Seine.
The exhibition is presented in two parts, says its curator Jean-Luc Chalumeau. Inside the Orangerie of the Senate are paintings, photographs and video works in which artists depict the urban world sometimes as a place of happiness, but more often as disconcerting, threatening or simply deserted.