Cyprien Gaillard
Ocean II Ocean
Trafó – House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest
September 5–November 9, 2025

Cyprien Gaillard’s first solo exhibition in Hungary invites viewers beneath the surface where materials and sensibilities collide, whether it is the concrete bottom of a drained artificial lake in suburban Paris, the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, or Soviet metro stations buried underground. Gaillard juxtaposes different temporalities and geographies, blending built and natural environments, submerged histories, and everyday life. His work embraces the beauty of gradual and inevitable decay, revealing how fragments of the past shape our understanding of the present. The exhibition reflects rhythms of contrasting materialities and times, fusing fossil fuels with fossils of both past and future. Through this, Gaillard explores a world where the living and once-living intersect in haunting ways. The rhythm of slow erosion and sudden collapse oscillates throughout the exhibition, resonating with a sense of both resignation and violence. As Gaillard quotes Vladimir Nabokov: “The future is but the obsolete in reverse,” suggesting time’s layered complexity.

The Parks of Aomame
Group Exhibition with Cyprien Gaillard and Mire Lee
Okayama Art Summit
September 26–November 26, 2025

The theme of this year’s Okayama Art Summit is The Parks of Aomame, inspired by Aomame, the mysterious character from Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84. As Artistic Director Philippe Parreno describes in his statement, a curated group of thirty individuals and groups from twelve countries and regions—including artists, musicians, architects, designers, scientists, writers, and thinkers—will use their unique methods of expression to create new forms, transforming Okayama’s public spaces into places where reality and imagination naturally merge. Sprüth Magers is delighted that Cyprien Gaillard and Mire Lee are amongst the participating artists.

Cyprien Gaillard
Wassermusik
Haus der Kunst, Munich
October 17, 2025–March 22, 2026

Munich plays a central role in Cyprien Gaillard’s latest film Retinal Rivalry, a groundbreaking work exploring folded time and unreachable urban surfaces. Expanding on his stereoscopic motion pictures, Gaillard delves deeper into sculptural and psychedelic spaces, challenging our perception of images and their conventions. The Haus der Kunst draws on Gaillard’s search for artifacts and architecture that have lost their original purpose, using them to reflect on public monuments and their meanings. From there, the museum questions how its own building stands as a monument to its complex history, and how new works by living artists might inspire renewal. The exhibition titled Wassermusik presents this film installation, born from intense photographic research, alongside a new series of site-specific artworks, inviting viewers to reconsider history, memory, and urban spaces through a fresh artistic lens.

Cyprien Gaillard
Retinal Rivalry
May 3–July 26, 2025
Berlin

Cyprien Gaillard’s new stereoscopic film, Retinal Rivalry (2024), is an entrancing journey through Germany’s urban landscape and its layers of historical and social significance. A decade after the premiere of Nightlife in 2015, Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are honoured to present the German debut of Gaillard’s major new film installation during Gallery Weekend Berlin. Building on his previous exploration of the sculptural qualities of three-dimensional moving images, the work extends beyond the confines of the screen. By harnessing cutting-edge technology to its full potential, Gaillard offers an expanded, sharpened and deeply affecting novel view of the world around us. The solo show shares its title with the film and is completed by new wall sculptures.

Cyprien Gaillard
Reefs to Rigs
February 11–July 24, 2020
Los Angeles

Reefs to Rigs is an exhibition of new sculptures and photographs by Cyprien Gaillard, as well as his most recent film, in a presentation that connects with the Los Angeles gallery’s particular site above a future LA Metro station and across from the La Brea Tar Pits. At this intersection of urban infrastructure and prehistoric matter, Gaillard’s works emphasize the cyclical, era-spanning interactions between nature and human industry, made visible and palpable through materials encountered across the world.

Cyprien Gaillard
Where Nature Runs Riot
May 2–July 16, 2015
Berlin

At the core of Cyprien Gaillard’s exhibition Where Nature Runs Riot is Nightlife (2015), a major new film shot at night over the past two years in Cleveland, Los Angeles and Berlin.

Nightlife begins with a shot of a rippling form that looks as if it were carved from the very light of the projection. As the camera pans to the right to reveal a pitted surface of greenish bronze, one of the most iconic sculptures of the twentieth century slowly fills the frame: Rodin’s The Thinker. This particular cast, one of the few overseen by Rodin himself, is in the forecourt of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Cyprien Gaillard, Morris Louis
From Wings to Fins
October 15–November 16, 2013
London

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are delighted to announce From Wings to Fins, an exhibition of Color Field paintings by Morris Louis and new work by Cyprien Gaillard. While discussing his earliest body of work with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gaillard remarked that his process involves going ‘deeper into the crevice of negativity or failure to rise again somehow’. Gaillard travels in search of everything from overlooked corners of the landscape to colossal ruins, sites of potent desolation that he re-imagines as haunting objects.

Rethinking Location
Rosa Barba, Cyprien Gaillard, Andreas Hofer, David Maljkovic, Trevor Paglen, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Sterling Ruby, Paul Sietsema, Taryn Simon, Armando Andrade Tudela, Andro Wekua
May 1–June 21, 2010
Berlin

Evolving from the work of twelve conceptual artists, filmmakers and photographers presenting alternate interpretations of fictional geographies, imaginary sites and "mash-up" destinations, the exhibition Rethinking Location reconsiders the notion of location. In an era characterized by a rapidly changing perception of time and space due to ever increasing mobility, migration and globalization, our understanding of what a location is has significantly transformed.

Cyprien Gaillard
November 20, 2009–January 16, 2010
Berlin