GERARD & KELLY

Eileen Gray (1878-1976), a Paris-based Irish architect and designer, was the author of a fundamental work of architectural modernism: villa E-1027, built in the bay of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Completed in 1929, the villa is one of France’s three national monuments of the modern era, and the only one built by a woman. Inspired by the layout and volumes of an ocean liner, the house’s vast windows open onto the sky and the Mediterranean. A self-taught architect, Gray meticulously designed every detail of E-1027, including the furniture within the villa, to create a functional living space. Upon entering the gallery, the flickering of Défense de rire, 2025, which combines the Pailla lamp with a stencil conceived by Gray for E-1027, guides visitors to the lower level for the start of the film. Downstairs the 22-minute film E for Eileen, 2023, shot entirely in situ, is shown every half-hour. A seating module renders the negative space of the solarium in the villa’s garden, and is covered in cork—a material frequently used by Gray. The Pailla lamp reappears in Solarium ensoleillé, 2025, to illuminate a wall-mounted scaled model of this sunbathing platform constructed from layers of mat board.

The film—part visual essay, part speculative fiction—magnifies Gray’s talent by emphasizing the living dimension of her architecture, which is designed to facilitate the circulation of bodies and natural light. As in Gerard & Kelly’s previous films E for Eileen, questions the ways of living and moving in a given construction by featuring historical characters linked to the site: Eileen Gray (played by Nikki Amuka-Bird), and two of her lovers, architect and critic Jean Badovici (played by Colin Bates) and the famous music-hall singer Damia (Flora Fischbach). With this film, Gerard & Kelly subtly evoke the inner life and social world of Eileen Gray, an openly bisexual woman, who frequented the pre-war Parisian lesbian literary circle and launched her own design gallery in Paris in 1922 under a male pseudonym. From her limited personal archive, Gerard & Kelly have designed four light boxes; Portrait Recto/Verso, Monsieur Gray, Eclipse, and Souvenir (after a photograph by Eileen Gray), 2025 are fragments of memory and clues that lend new insight to Gray’s elusive personality.

In the gallery’s vaulted space, another forgotten artist, Francesco di Stefano, known as Pesellino (1422-1457), emerges from the shadows. Like Eileen Grey, Pesellino was prolific during his lifetime, receiving commissions from the Medici in Florence and collaborating with the leading painters of his time. He died prematurely of the plague at the age of 35. Gerard & Kelly’s sculpture Glory Hole, 2025, inspired by Pesellino’s painting of St. Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata now in the collection of the Louvre Museum, transforms the space into a postmodern sanctuary. The saint, wearing his cassock, half-reclines on the floor; a mirror ball has penetrated his flesh and replaced his head. An emblematic symbol of the disco era, this ball bridges the gap between the worlds of nightlife and the sacred, and its perpetual spinning evokes the wandering of the bardo.

The final chapter of the exhibition unfolds in the gallery’s showroom, with new works that enter into a subtle dialogue with Julius Eastman (1940-1990), a queer, black American composer active in New York in the 1970s and 80s. In the Glyphs series, Gerard & Kelly applied fragments of musical notation onto silk screened images of dancers, captured in glyph-like gestures and shimmering like holograms. Reminiscent of medieval illuminated manuscripts, the artists’ process of pressing gold leaf is an act of devotion: a transcription of Eastman’s handwritten score for Gay Guerrilla (1979). Gerard & Kelly’s engagement with his oeuvre, which was largely lost at the time of his premature death, dates back several years. His music featured in the their film Panorama, 2021, shot in the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, and in their performance Gay Guerrilla__, 2023, created at the Centre Pompidou. In new large-format works rendered in silkscreen, stencil and neon, Pompidou Pulse, 2025 and Disco Saint, 2025, the artists integrate images of the emblematic architecture of the Centre Pompidou with disco dancers captured in ecstatic states. Gerard & Kelly transform the dancer into a saintly figure, evoking a bardo in which the sacred and the profane cohabitate and where buildings and bodies dissolve.