GALLERIA CONTINUA
Max Ernst & Joaquín Ferrer
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"Les surprises du hasard"
MAX ERNST & JOAQUÍN FERRER - Les surprises du hasard exhibition view, Galleria Continua / Paris Matignon. Photo: © Paul Hennebelle. Paris ADAGP 2025
GALLERIA CONTINUA is delighted to present Les Surprises du hasard, an unprecedented dialogue between Max Ernst and Joaquín Ferrer, two major figures born on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, whose deep intellectual and artistic friendship has long gone unrecognized. Indeed, Ernst gave Ferrer a great deal of support shortly after his arrival in France in the 1960s. Coinciding with Spring Art Week, this singular face-to-face encounter unfolds in the gallery space located in the heart of Paris’s Matignon district.
Les surprises du hasard was the title of a series of lithographs by Max Ernst presented by the Galerie Alphonse Chave in Vence in 1971, 45 compositions unforeseen by chance alone, as the artist himself points out in the catalog. And it’s to such happy, fertile chance that we owe the friendly relationship between Max Ernst and Joaquín Ferrer – a meeting placed under the sign of surprise, yet which, from the very first moment, seemed to them to have been written in advance. Max Ernst and Joaquín Ferrer met somewhere in 1967, over lunch at the home of poet and writer Alain Bosquet. At the time, Max Ernst was already a famous artist, while Joaquín Ferrer was a young man who had just arrived in Paris in 1960 on a Cuban government scholarship. From their first meeting, Max Ernst was struck by the power of the young painter’s drawings and paintings – to the point of being reassured.
It seems to him that, in a contemporary art world overly focused on sensation and media hype, there are still artistic approaches that seek to find their way outside the din of the world. “Deeply authentic” is how he sees Ferrer’s enigmatic, abstract and biomorphic compositions, bathed in delicate pastel tones and nurtured in the vast orbit of surrealism.
– Excerpt from Julia Drost’s text
Group show with Max Ernst & Joaquín Ferrer
From April 3rd to May 31st, 2025
The gallery
Galleria Continua is a contemporary art gallery founded in 1990 in San Gimignano by three friends: Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi and Maurizio Rigillo.
Galleria Continua represents a desire for continuity between times and a desire to write a current history. Thanks to its investment in forgotten and unconventional sites, the gallery has always chosen atypical locations, developing a strong identity and an original positioning in over thirty years of activity. In 2021, Galleria Continua opened a new space in the heart of the French capital. This space is dedicated to experimentation and the encounter between art, society and culture, in a constantly evolving setting.
Gallery artists
Adel Abdessemed, Etel Adnan, Ai Weiwei, Leila Alaoui, Juan Araujo, Kader Attia, Barbana Bojadzi, Daniel Buren, Cai Guo-Qiang , Alejandro Campins, Iván Capote, Yoan Capote, Loris Cecchini, Elizabet Cerviño, Chen Zhen, Nikhil Chopra, Marcelo Cidade , Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jonathas De Andrade, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Leandro Erlich, Carlos Garaicoa, Osvaldo González, Antony Gormley, Gu Dexin, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, Carsten Höller, Eva Jospin, Jr, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Zhanna Kadyrova, Kan Xuan, Anish Kapoor, André Komatsu, Jannis Kounellis, Julio Le Parc, Luis López-Chávez, Jorge Macchi, Ahmed Mater, Cildo Meireles, José Manuel Mesías, Sabrina Mezzaqui, Moataz Nasr, Rudi Ninov, Hans Op De Beeck, Ornaghi & Prestinari, Giovanni Ozzola, Susana Pilar, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Qiu Zhijie, Tobias Rehberger, Arcangelo Sassolino, Manuela Sedmach, Serse, Kiki Smith, Nedko Solakov, Marta Spagnoli, José Antonio Suárez Londoño, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Ana Maria Tavares, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Armando Testa, Nari Ward, Sislej Xhafa, José Yaque, Zhuang Hui
