Frith Street Gallery Le Molière | 2026: Pop-up project
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We are delighted to return to Paris this autumn with a special pop-up project at 40 rue de Richelieu coinciding with Art Basel Paris.
19–25 October 2026
Monday–Saturday 9am–8pm
Sunday 10am–5pmThis year Frith Street Gallery Le Molière focuses on important works by four gallery artists: Dayanita Singh, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Tacita Dean and Cornelia Parker.
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Dayanita Singh uses photography to reflect and expand on the ways in which we relate to images. Her works, drawn from an extensive photographic oeuvre, often take the form of 'mobile museums' that allow images to be edited, sequenced, archived and displayed. Stemming from Singh's interest in the archive, the museums present her photographs as interconnected bodies of work that are replete with both poetic and narrative possibilities.
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Museo delle sedie, 2026
85 framed photographs, teak, museum acrylic, 1 large structure, 5 boxes with 3 images each
Museo delle sedie, 2026 is the artist’s most recent photo-architectural work, consisting of one large teak structure that may be configured in a variety of ways, and five teak boxes, stored inside a central pillar, ready to be hung on the surrounding walls.The 85 photographs contained within Museo delle sedie are inspired by the artist's Chairs series, initiated during a residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 2002. In these images Singh approaches the empty chair as a portrait, taking on its own personality and 'essence'. Singh has called the process a 'conversation with chairs', by which she means - as curator Pieranna Cavalchini has explained - 'conversing with the unseen and untold generations who had interacted with these objects.'All the images in Museo delle sedie were taken in Italy, where Singh has been photographing for over 25 years. In the same year as the Gardner Museum residency, the artist visited Italy with Cavalchini in search of Renaissance chairs, meeting with the furniture scholar Fausto Calderai, whose home she ended up photographing over many hours in the shifting light. It was on this visit that she first encountered the Corsini family archive, beginning a career-long project documenting state and family archives across the country, which manifested earlier this year in the solo exhibition ARCHIVIO at the Archivio di stato di Venezia and Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome. The works shown here for the first time are born from ARCHIVIO – an exhibition discovered within an exhibition. -
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In addition to Museo delle sedie are three domestically-scaled museums – Let’s Eat, 2026, FNV Sofas, 2026 and Firenze Chairs House Museum, 2024. These works are singular teak boxes containing three framed images, each of which may be removed and positioned at the front of the structure to be made visible. In Let’s Eat, the groups of vacant chairs around tables conjure thoughts of collective dining, while FNV Sofas captures sofas encountered in Florence, Naples, and Venice.
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Wall: FNV Sofas, 2026
1 teak box, holding 3 archival pigment prints
Floor: Firenze Chairs House Museum, 2024
Teak structure, framed silver gelatin prints
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Firenze Chairs House Museum, 2024
Teak structure, framed silver gelatin prints
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The practice of Romani artist, educator, and activist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas addresses anti-Roma stereotypes and engages in building an affirmative iconography of Roma communities. The artist’s vibrant textile collages are created from materials and fabrics collected from family and friends, which imbues them with a life of their own and a corresponding immediacy. Her sumptuous patchworks made of curtains, jewellery, shirts, and sheets depict everyday life, relationships, alliances and shared activities.
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Left: Maria Mirga-Casar, 2025
Textile, acrylic on wooden stretcher
Centre: Out of Egypt, 2026
Textile, mixed media on stretcher
Right: Sofia’s Hospitality, 2026
Textile, mixed media on stretcher
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Sofia’s Hospitality, 2026
Textile, mixed media on stretcher
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Wall: Romani Ćhaj peskreja Ryćhinoha / Romani girl with a bear, 2025
Textile, mixed media
Floor: Ryćhino / Roma bear (2), 2025
Wax
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Tacita Dean is internationally acclaimed for her analogue films which are celebrated for their material precision and poetic depth. Throughout her career she has also devoted sustained attention to the act of drawing, which is never merely preparatory but rather a mode of thinking in itself.
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Left: This whole earth may be bored, 2025
Spray chalk, chalk, gouache and white charcoal pencil on slate
Mirrored reflection: A different place, 2025
Spray chalk, chalk, gouache and white charcoal pencil on slate
Dean has been using found, grey school slates for over a decade. She draws on their scuffed and patinated surfaces with spray chalk, gouache and white pencil. The works often depict clouds and planets and their titles come from A Complete Concordance to Shakespeare, an alphabetical list of all the lines in the poet’s works. The artist was recently given a collection of school slates that had been painted green (they date from an era when that colour was considered to be gentler on the eye). The paint on these had oxidised, creating a febrile powdery surface which necessitated a change of approach to how it could be worked.
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Left: A green and yellow melancholy, 2025
Chalk, pearlescent powdered pigment, gouache and white charcoal pencil on found painted slate
Right: A different place, 2025
Spray chalk, chalk, gouache and white charcoal pencil on slate
In these pieces the drawings consist of snaking contours in smoky chalk that spirals and twists around the smudged surface. Their origin relates to photos the artist took of a solar eclipse in central Texas. There she attempted to capture the phenomenon with a rotary lens and slow shutter pointed at the disappearing sun (but never looking through the camera aperture). The resulting images with their lyrical and looping solar streaks are reminiscent of Cy Twombly’s gestures and images which she had in mind when making these drawings, pulling chalk playfully across the slates’ surfaces. This group of works in many ways pays homage to Twombly while expanding the idea of drawing, connecting it to the recurring themes in Dean’s own practice of blindness and chance.
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Locomotive Drawings: Pan and Hermes (diptych), 2025
Enamel on found tarnished steam train window
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Cornelia Parker is concerned with formalising forces beyond our control, containing the volatile and transforming it into something that is quiet and contemplative. She is fascinated with processes that mimic archetypal cartoon ‘deaths’ – explosions, steamrollering, being shot full of holes, and falling from cliffs. Through a combination of visual and verbal allusions, her work triggers cultural metaphors and personal associations, which allow the viewer to witness the transformation of the most ordinary objects into something compelling and extraordinary.
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Left: Bullet Drawing (Crosshairs), 2013
Lead from bullets, melted down and drawn into wire, threaded through paper, crayon
Plinth: Alter Ego (Coffee over Tea), 2026
Two silver-plated objects, one flattened by a 250 ton press, suspended on metal wire
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The exhibition includes several new Alter Ego sculptures from an ongoing series. These are composed of pairs of silver-plated objects, one intact and the other flattened. Sometimes their reflection is a 'double', at other times a near relative. Cornelia Parker thinks of these works as 'domestics', not only in terms of the spaces that they can occupy (hovering over the mantle or tabletop) but also in the sense of power play, where one of the objects has the upper hand. Often in this series, it is the more 'working-class' object that remains intact, while its 'upper-class' counterpoint has been crushed.
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Thoughts of identity crises and the duality of class divisions abound in these pieces, as well as ideas of life and death, inhaling and exhaling, conscious and unconscious, reflection and shadow. Sometimes, there's a sense of a dark psychological undertow, an underlying threat; at other times, just reflected glory.
In this particular series, Parker has deliberately altered the spatial relationship between each pair of objects. Here, the flattened object is more like a shadow (rather than a double or a reflection), suggesting that distinctions between power and privilege are not fixed.
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Alter Ego (Two Teapots), 2026
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Installation photography: Mark Blower
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