Plein Soleil at Galleria Continua Paris evokes summer to interrogate emigration

Galleria Continua presents Plein Soleil, a group exhibition on view from June 12 – September 19, 2026, at the gallery’s two Paris spaces—Marais and Matignon. The art exhibition brings together 22 artists who use colour, light, landscape and materiality to explore both the pleasures and contradictions of summer. “By evoking the imagery of holidays and leisure, the exhibition invites reflection on the privilege that the very possibility of travel and movement represents. It sheds light on the environmental stakes tied to tourist mass flows, while also evoking a more subtle layer of meaning: emigration, driven by harsh political, economic or climatic realities. This way, the imagery of mobility, discovery and escape takes on a more ambivalent dimension, revealing the inequalities that underpin our relationship to movement,” Galleria Continua explains in the show's press release.

Taking its title from René Clément’s 1960 film Plein Soleil, the exhibition at the gallery’s Paris Marais location draws on the cinematic tension between Mediterranean beauty and the darkness concealed beneath it. “In much the same way, Plein Soleil allows essential questions of our contemporary societies to surface behind a joyful, summery aesthetic. It thus invites the viewer to move beyond the immediate seduction of the works and interrogate the more complex issues they convey,” the art gallery notes.

The contemporary artists on view include Adel Abdessemed, Ai Weiwei, Juan Araujo, Barbana Bojadzi, Hans Op de Beeck, Yoan Capote, Loris Cecchini, Elizabet Cerviño, Nikhil Chopra, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Leandro Erlich, Subodh Gupta, JR, José Mesías, Giovanni Ozzola, Serse, Nedko Solakov, Marta Spagnoli, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Nari Ward, Sislej Xhafa and José Yaque.

Colour takes centre stage at the show, creating an atmosphere of brightness and vitality. “It calls to the mind flowering trees, the colourful parasols of summer beaches, the bustle of tourist crowds, starlit nights, the discoveries of travel and moments of leisure,” the contemporary art gallery notes. Yet the exhibition’s apparent lightness is repeatedly disrupted. Marthine Tayou’s Plastic Tree, for instance, presents an exuberant fruit tree whose flowers are made from plastic bags. The work transforms a familiar image of natural abundance into a pointed reflection on waste and the environmental consequences of consumption.

Weiwei’s Wave sculpture challenges the romantic image of the sea. A symbol traditionally associated with freedom, openness and travel, the wave’s foam transforms into threatening claws, introducing an unsettling dimension to an otherwise familiar summer landscape. The sea becomes a poignant site of reflection in Capote’s Sentimientos encontrados (melancolía), made from numerous echocardiograms that collectively form a turbulent maritime surface. “Behind the poetry of this maritime expanse lies the tragedy of contemporary migration, recalling the fate of those who cross the waters at the risk of their lives in the hope of a better future,” Galleria Continua notes.

Movement and memory also emerge in Gupta’s Untitled work, where a stroller overflowing with everyday possessions becomes a meditation on what we choose to carry with us, “the importance we place on them in the construction of our identity, and the need to carry them along in contexts of migration so as not to lose one’s memories and roots”, the gallery adds. On the other hand, De Bruyckere’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, made in 1992, sees a basket of roses—an enduring symbol of beauty and vitality—rendered immobile in lead.

“The exhibition unfolds the full complexity of contemporary society, its contradictions and persistent inequalities, with the intention not of concealing or softening them, but of exposing them, in broad daylight,” Galleria Continua states.