The president of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Alan Seban, along with the Mayor of Málaga, Francisco de la Torre, participated in the official presentation of the new Pompidou Centre in Malaga, which will be housed in the large space of El Cubo in Pier One and will open in 2015. They unveiled and endorsed the dimension of this important initiative that will not solely feature the exhibition of works by artists like Frida Kahlo, Picasso, Magritte and Fernand Leger, but it will also reflect the strategy and innovative approaches that characterize the Parisian Centre. Alan Seban announced that the first permanent exhibition will feature a survey of eighty works of modern and contemporary art that begins and ends with Picasso as an artist born in Malaga and a central figure in Twentieth Century art. Likewise, the Mayor of Malaga, Francisco de la Torre, said that the Pompidou in Malaga hopes to welcome some 200,000 visitors in its first year. "Malaga will be at the forefront of the development of the Centre Pompidou in France and abroad," said Seban during his participation. He defended the notion of the Malaga headquarters as a laboratory to implement new ideas on how to tell the history of art, connect the social and cultural fabric of the environment and interact with the public, particularly with young people, as Pompidou Malaga plans to give special attention to them. Through this approach, the new cultural institution will complement and strengthen the proposals already offer by the CAC Málaga, the Museo Picasso Malaga, the Museo Carmen Thyssen Malaga and, in the near future, a branch of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, the Centro Sol Levitt and the Museo de Bellas Artes en la Aduana, to the point of turning Malaga into one of the cities in Europe with the best museum offers. Francisco de la Torre indicated that Pompidou Malaga is part of "a strategy to serve the city," and a powerful cultural drive that has been evolving for years and that is "in line with an innovative Malaga at the vanguard of technology." He also said that he wanted to share the financial effort with private companies interested in a project whose excellence will translate into positive media attention. "It is time for companies to act on behalf of this great purpose" and thus share some of the responsibility in order to alleviate the role of the Mayor's office.