Gagosian has teamed up with move director Wes Anderson to recreate the New York studio of American artist Joseph Cornell at the mega-gallery’s Paris space on 9 rue de Castiglione. It will be part of an exhibition curated by Jasper Sharp and titled “The House of Utopia Parkway,” which is slated to run from December 16 to March 14, 2026.
The gallery will be transformed into “a meticulously staged tableau, part time capsule, part life-size shadow box, for the first solo presentation of Cornell’s work in Paris in more than four decades,” Gagosian said in a statement. “Born in 1903 in Nyak, New York, Joseph Cornell could not draw, paint, or sculpt, and received no formal art education, yet he produced one of the most original and extraordinary bodies of work of any artist in the twentieth century.”
Anderson, whose work includes The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), has drawn inspiration from Cornell. Take the symmetry of the latter’s Palace (1943), for example; its composition and symmetry mirrors many of Anderson’s iconically balanced scenes.
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Several examples of the late artist’s glass-fronted “shadow boxes” will feature in the show, which Gagosian described as “poetic reliquaries of memory and imagination.” They include Pharmacy (1943), modelled after an apothecary cabinet and once owned by Teeny and Marcel Duchamp; Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy) (circa 1950) from his “Medici” series portraying multiple reproductions of Bernardino Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy (circa 1500) behind amber- tinted glass; and A Dressing Room for Gille (1939), which pays homage to Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Gilles (1721) from the collection of the Louvre.
Cornell’s work can be found in the Centre Pompidou, Tate, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, MoMa, and Art Institute of Chicago, among other major museums.
Before he was an artist, he was a collector, and spent hours on end searching New York’s stories for objects that sparked an emotional connection. He collected things like 19th-century French novels, clay pipes, and ticket stubs, which formed the basis of his art. They were given new life in his collages, objets d’art, and boxed constructions. As the Smithsonian American Art Museum wrote on its website, “although Cornell never considered himself a surrealist, he found inspiration in the collages of Max Ernst and the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp. He exhibited alongside them and maintained friendships with these artists in the 1930s and 1940s. Their confident embrace of an art form without a need for painting or sculpture encouraged Cornell’s experimentation and his work of this time can be considered a cross between Surrealism and Victorian art and craft hobby.”
Joseph Cornell’s studio in the basement of his family home in Queens, New York, 1971. Photo: © Harry Roseman
