PARIS.- Peter Freeman, Inc. is presenting Elisabetta Benassi’s first solo exhibition at its Parisian location and her second with the gallery.
The exhibition takes its title from J. G. Ballard’s first novel, The Wind from Nowhere, in which an unexplained force progressively erases every point of reference. At the center of the gallery space, a 1940s wooden rowboat hangs upside down above the viewers’ heads and rotates, seemingly oscillating in response to an invisible force or current like a compass needle without a north pole, an instrument of passage and rescue transformed into a suspended threat.
Words, travel, direction, and escape converge into a single image of arrest and tension. Hanging on the wall, editions of Ballard's The Wind from Nowhere and The Terminal Beach, are pierced by burned oars transformed into spears. They appear as silent vectors of violence and markers of a hostile geography. On a mechanic’s workbench, a yellow navigation globe points toward the Sculptor’s constellation: a posthumous, manual, precarious form of orientation, a “celestial archeology”. Above, an inactive Seagull engine holds the promise of propulsion without a sea. Motionless, it remains charged with latent energy—a technical prosthesis without a route.
The exhibition constructs a physical and mental landscape in which the boat, engine, books, oars, and globe appear as relics of a larger shipwreck—instruments of navigation separated from their natural element. To enter the space is to enter a field of forces: weight from above, lateral tension, unstable ground, a remapped sky. Together, they define a world in which technology does not offer salvation, nature has already become machine, and art poses a radical question about orientation in a time of disaster.
Elisabetta Benassi (b. 1966, Rome) has had solo exhibitions at MACRO - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (2024); Museo Nazionale Romano, Crypta Balbi, Rome (2022); Fondazione Adolfo Pini, Milan, Italy (2021); Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2017); CRAC Alsace, Centre rhénan d'art contemporain, Altkirch, France (2013–2014); and Fondazione Merz, Torino, Italy (2013). Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Fondation Villa Datris, L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, France (through 1 November, 2026); MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome (through 20 September, 2026); MACRO - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (2025–2026); EMST - National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2025–2026); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2024–2025); and Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome (2021). The artist has taken part in the 2011, 2013, and 2015 editions of La Biennale di Venezia and her work can be found in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris; Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, Stuttgart; Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna; MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania.
