PARIS.- Galleria Continua is presenting the group exhibition Pièces à vivre, featuring works by Ai Weiwei, Juan Araujo, Alejandro Campins, Yoan Capote, Loris Cecchini, Chen Zhen, Nikhil Chopra, Jonathas De Andrade, Leandro Erlich, Subodh Gupta, Eva Jospin, Julio Le Parc, Jorge Macchi, Sabrina Mezzaqui, Hans Op de Beeck, Ornaghi & Prestinari, Giovanni Ozzola, SusanaPilar, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Arcangelo Sassolino, Manuela Sedmach, Serse, José Antonio Suárez Londoño, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Armando Testa, Nari Ward, Sislej Xhafa, and José Yaque.


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From its inception, Galleria Continua’s first Parisian space has stood out thanks to its uniquelocation : a former wholesale leather goods store, resembling a through- house, nestled in the heart of the Marais. Since its opening in 2021, the gallery has challenged traditional exhibition norms - most notably with its inaugural show Truc à faire, conceived by artist JR during the pandemic, which transformed the space into a supermarket, with an actual grocery corner integrated into the exhibition space. In 2022, the gallery expanded with the addition of a café and bookstore. In 2024, it inaugurated Cinema Continua, a basement space dedicated to screening video art projects by the gallery’s represented artists. Renovated by the architecture firm MBL, the space preserves traces of its past : original tiling and remnants of wallpaper serve as markers of preserved memory and tangible history. The gallery remains true to its identity and to its goal of creating a temporal continuity between past and present, offering an authentic space where art and life intertwine.

It is within this hybrid dynamic that Pièces à vivre takes shape: an exhibition conceived as a “ house of art,” where each room is transformed into a reimagined domestic space. We find familiar everyday spaces — living room, kitchen, bathroom, hallway, children’s bedroom, master bedroom, dressing room — to which are added, in the spirit of an imagined and expanded house, designed according to aesthetic principles rather than functional ones, an observatory, a library (integrating the gallery’s bookstore at the heart of the exhibition path), a courtyard, a gym, and a study.

This curatorial approach aims to blur the lines between art and everyday life, inviting the public to step through the gallery doors, to wander, and to take the time to discover works from around the world in a warm, homelike setting. This fictional house, designed to evoke an emotional journey, allows each work to engage deeply with its surroundings, revealing fragments of personal and collective stories. Some works occupy intimate spaces, while others resonate with everyday gestures.

By posing the impossible question of its inhabitants’ identity, Pièces à vivre explores what shapes our presences and absences, what weaves our connections — between dreams and memories, fears and desires, secret aspirations - and offers a hollow narrative, composed of clues, silences, and projections. Each artwork subtly transforms the room it inhabits, imbuing it with a new meaning - often poetic, sometimes critical.

In the master bedroom, the duo Ornaghi & Prestinari presents the installation Bedroom, inspired by Italo Calvino’s story Adventure of a Married Couple. A couple, separated by opposing work schedules, can no longer meet. When one light turns on, the other turns off - poetically expressing the soft tension between closeness and distance, partial presence and hindered intimacy inherent to shared life.

In the kitchen, the beating heart of every home, Untitled (2023) by Subodh Gupta features a storage unit covered in ladles, plates, and metal utensils, topped by a hologram of a steaming pot. The artist transforms these banal objects into sacred relics of the everyday, evoking family memory, care, and the rituality of domestic gestures.

At the center of the living room, Arcangelo Sassolino’s coffee table Public Morality bends under the weight of a stone, striking a delicate balance between the resistance and flexibility of material. In the background, José Yaque’s canvas continues this reflection on materiality, evoking the mineral nuances of stone and revealing its layered composition.

In the children’s room, Ai Weiwei’s Broadway Boogie Woogie reinterprets Mondrian through LEGO bricks. Here, play becomes a critical medium : the work questions the reproducibility of art, visual standardization, and the relationship between the avant garde and popular culture. Childhood - an open ground for experimentation - becomes the foundation for nuanced artistic reflection.

In the inner courtyard, Eva Jospin installs Balcon. Diverted from its traditional function of opening outward, the balcony is here integrated into the gallery’s interior space. This poetic inversion blurs the boundaries between nature and architecture, inside and outside, suggesting a dreamlike, vegetal, suspended architecture.

Throughout the exhibition, a sensitive and embodied vision of art unfolds. Pièces à vivre is grounded in a clear intention : to open contemporary art - not by simplifying it, but by anchoring it in what is close to us, in objects, spaces, and everyday gestures. It encourages us to rethink the place of art in our lives - not as something distant or decorative, but as a companion in thought, emotion, and perception. The gallery becomes a home ; the home becomes a work of art.


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