Gagosian Paris will debut The House on Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s Studio Reimagined by Wes Anderson on December 16, 2025, marking the first solo presentation of Cornell’s work in Paris in over forty years. Conceived by curator Jasper Sharp and filmmaker Wes Anderson, the exhibition reconstructs the artist’s original Queens studio inside the gallery at 9 rue de Castiglione, transforming the space into a walk-in tableau of objects, artworks, and archival material.
EXHIBITIONS
Joseph Cornell, known for his boxed assemblages built from collected ephemera, worked from the basement of his family home on Utopia Parkway, surrounded by labeled shoeboxes filled with feathers, prints, toys, marbles, maps, and found fragments he called his “spare parts department.” Although he never traveled outside the United States, Paris remained a constant reference in his work, informed by correspondence with Marcel Duchamp and years spent collecting European imagery, postcards, and books.
The Paris reconstruction includes more than three hundred items from Cornell’s own archive, alongside key shadow boxes such as Pharmacy (1943), Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy) (c. 1950), A Dressing Room for Gille (1939), and Blériot II (c. 1956). Several unfinished boxes on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Joseph Cornell Study Center offer a rare view into the artist’s process.
The gallery installation will be visible from the street, echoing Cornell’s box constructions while functioning as a full-scale interior set. Anderson’s longtime collaborators and exhibition designer Cécile Dégos developed the environment to mirror the scale, order, and quiet atmosphere of the original studio.
The exhibition runs from December 16, 2025, to March 14, 2026. A parallel survey of Wes Anderson’s film career opens one month earlier at the Design Museum in London.
