Galleria Continua celebrates over 30 years of resilience with 'The Ability to Dream'

Almost 35 years after its founding in the small Italian town of San Gimignano, Galleria Continua looks back at its history and impact in the exhibition, The Ability to Dream. On view from June 23 - October 20, 2024, the group show is a love letter to the curators, collectors, craftsmen and almost 70 artists who have helped bring the vision of the gallery’s founders to life. The exhibition shares its name with the 2022 documentary which followed the friends and collaborators of the art gallery as they reflected on its history. Expanded into a trilogy of exhibitions, The Ability to Dream has travelled to Paris, Florence and now to Les Moulins.

The Ability to Dream materialises the founders’ core belief in the importance of art, love and friendship. This is expressed in the themes of individual artworks and the assemblage of contemporary artists from diverse backgrounds and practices united by their relationships with Galleria Continua.

True to its name, the eclectic exhibition seeks to establish continuity between the past, present and future. After all, only as restrictive boundaries — geographical, temporal, spatial, social or physical — are crossed and blurred, can connection and love materialise. These transgressive efforts give the art exhibition its dreamlike, surreal quality.

Pieces such as Carlos Cruz-Diez’s giant saturated panels from his Transchromies series use colour to visualise the power of connections and intersections. As panels overlap, each colour transforms the other to form new ones in a vibrant synthesis. Similarly, the spiral painting by Julio Le Parc uses a limited colour palette and Op art techniques to create coloured dots that seem to move, mix and even leave the confines of the canvas of their own accord.

The lifesize sculpture art from the duo Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Teenager Teenager series is particularly arresting. The heads of three formal, middle-aged adults on a leather sofa are replaced with giant boulders. The mundane reality of the scene is destabilised and interrupted by the absurd. The siloed heads draw attention to emotional space and its distinction from physical space. Pascale Marthine Tayou’s fantastical crystal totems take on space on a global scale, inspired by Venetian glass and African totems and constructed using crystal and consumer waste. The juxtaposition of cultures, techniques and materials is a hallmark of Tayou’s contemporary art style and his engagement with the idea of the 'global village.'

Amid the playful, colourful and unexpected, there is a place for another kind of dreaming. Hans Op de Beeck’s characteristically atonal piece, Pond (circular 200) (2013), emanates a quiet gravity from the gallery floor. The rendering of a usually colourful, fluid ecosystem in a realist style but in heavy materials and solemn grey creates an uncanny effect. Loris Cecchini’s atonal piece relies similarly on fitting in, rather than standing out, to achieve its effect. The sculpture from her Wallwave Vibrations series takes the wall—solid and reliable—and makes it unfamiliar and fluid, creating a visual rupture in reality.

Additionally, Subodh Gupta’s famous towering pile of steel utensils teems with potential energy in its haphazard arrangement. Adel Abdessemed’s Le Vase Abominable (2013) is similarly unstable, a terracotta vase balanced on a maze of electronic circuits and explosive charges. Both works flirt with destruction and threaten the illusory certainty of future moments.

The art installation also contains artworks by Ai Weiwei, Ana Maria Tavares, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Leandro Erlich, Shilpa Gupta and Zhanna Kadyrova. Each of them is an experience that seeks to surprise, challenge and reorient the minds and senses of viewers.

Despite this ambition, The Ability to Dream does not feel combative. The effect elicited is that of taking a second look—a fresh, closer look—at something quotidian, often taken for granted, whether it is a wall or the colour itself. It evokes a special form of attention that separates an object from a sculpture, a stranger from a loved one. The dreamlike uncertainty of the exhibition becomes a celebration of art, love, friendship and connection. The Ability to Dream brought the contemporary art gallery to its improbable conception in a rural town in 1990 and with the eponymous exhibition, Galleria Continua comes full circle.

'The Ability to Dream' is on view from June 23 - October 20, 2024, at Galleria Continua, Les Moulins.

(Text by Srishti Ojha, intern at STIR)