Pièces à vivre transforms everyday rituals into poetic encounters at Galleria Continua

Galleria Continua's Paris Marais outpost presents Pièces à vivre, a group exhibition on view from June 6 – September 6, 2025, reimagining the art gallery as a lived-in home. Featuring more than two dozen international artists, from Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei, Indian artist Subodh Gupta, to France-based visual artist Eva Jospin and Italian painter Michelangelo Pistoletto, among others. The show blurs the lines between domesticity and artistic inquiry, asking what it means to inhabit spaces where art and life coalesce.

The art exhibition unfolds as an emotional journey through domestic archetypes, inviting visitors to wander from space to space, discovering artworks that recast familiar gestures and environments in poetic, critical or surreal registers. The curatorial premise is not to decorate, but to immerse: each artwork is a fragment of a larger story about presences and absences, dreams and memories, fears and desires.

Pièces à vivre transforms Galleria Continua into a 'house of art', where each room—living room, kitchen, bathroom, children's bedroom or even a study—hosts works that resonate with the rituals of everyday life. Several immersive installations anchor the narrative with striking materiality and conceptual depth. In the master bedroom, Italian artists Ornaghi & Prestinari's Bedroom recalls Italo Calvino's Adventure of a Married Couple. Through a play of alternating lights, the work stages the quiet tension of two lives out of sync, evoking intimacy, distance and the compromise of shared existence.

Subodh Gupta, known for employing utensils in monumental statements, turns the kitchen into a site of ritual memory. His Untitled (2023) comprises a storage unit clad in ladles, plates and pots, crowned by a holographic projection of steaming food. In the living room, sculptor Arcangelo Sassolino's Public Morality presents a coffee table bending under the weight of a heavy stone, testing the limits of balance, gravity and fragility. Nearby, Cuba-born José Yaque's canvas extends this meditation on matter, layering painterly textures.

The children's room hosts Ai Weiwei’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, a reimagining of Piet Mondrian's iconic painting using LEGO bricks. By deploying a child's toy to reconstruct a canonised modernist work, Weiwei questions reproducibility, standardisation and the thin border between avant-garde innovation and mass culture.

Together, these works frame the house as more than shelter: it becomes an archive of memory, a stage for everyday rituals and a canvas for dreams. Pièces à vivre emphasises art's ability to inhabit life—not as ornament, but as a companion in thought, perception and imagination.