Set in a top-floor Parisian apartment overlooking the city's landsmarks, the exhibition unfolds as an intimate dialogue between past and present.
A place of encounters and discoveries, Room with a View invites visitors to inhabit a living narrative shaped by friendship, curiosity and the pleasure of collecting.
The exhibition will be on view from October 20th to 26th, at 3 Avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris.
POLIMENO is pleased to present Room with a View, on view from October 20 to 26. The title immediately introduces one of the exhibition’s most distinctive features: its setting. A top-floor apartment in a typical Parisian building, located on one of the city's most emblematic, and increasingly art-associated, streets: Avenue Matignon. Simple yet elegant, the apartment offers an almost panoramic view of the capital’s iconic landmarks: from the Sacré-Cœur to the Eiffel Tower, from the Grand Palais to the Arc de Triomphe. A backdrop that is anything but marginal, on the contrary, it is deeply embedded in the visitor’s experience. Paris, suspended and infinite, is the first of many silent encounters that allowed Room with a View to take shape. The city, with its unpredictable and eclectic charm, becomes a stage for fluid coexistence, where boundaries dissolve and possibilities multiply. The exhibition is born precisely from this spirit: from personal encounters, lived moments, and relationships built over time, which have led to the creation of a narrative that is as hybrid as it is intimate and personal. The exhibition space takes on the appearance of a home, whose owner remains unknown. Yet through the tastes, inclinations, and sensibilities that emerge from the selection of works, one almost feels they know them better than a physical presence could ever convey. The white sheets hanging from the walls and the wooden crates placed like objects in transit evoke a home in transformation somewhere between a new beginning and a melancholic departure. Nothing is final; everything remains in suspension, even time itself, which bends and blurs across overlapping epochs with no hierarchy. The exhibition opens with a selection of ancient marbles, as Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, and from there unfolds into a continuous dialogue between the ancient and the contemporary. A photograph of a young Cy Twombly in the Valley of the Temples speaks to the artist’s deep and personal connection to classical antiquity, while the works of Egyptian architect Tarek Shamma merge modernity with cultural roots. Similarly, Mirrors and Masks by Kader Attia reinterprets ancestral rituals through a contemporary lens, transforming the past into a tool for awareness and repair. In this same tension between past and present, symbol and material, lie the jewelry pieces by Elie Top: wearable concentric worlds where astrology, alchemy, and artisanal mastery meet in a deeply contemporary language. Intimate and moving is Sleeping Child by Artemisia Gentileschi, portraying a sleeping child, an image of tenderness that resonates perfectly with the domestic tone of the space. A similar feeling emerges from François-Xavier Lalanne’s Nouveau Mouton, suspended between art and design, echoing the same sense of familiarity. Nan Goldin’s Hotel Room Zurich adds to this emotional thread with its quiet portrayal of an unmade bed in a private, transient space. Capturing the aftermath of presence, the photo speaks about intimacy, solitude, and the human traces left behind evoking memory as much as physicality. The narrative continues with iconic works from post-war Italian art: Cementoferro 6 by Mario Schifano, a Concetto Spaziale by Lucio Fontana and Una parola al vento by Alighiero Boetti, pieces that transform the painted surface into a conceptual, sensitive space. Room with a View unfolds as a place of encounters and curiosity, a crossroads where the pleasure of discovery and collecting becomes a shared experience. There is no fixed path or conclusion, only a continuum that visitors are invited to inhabit and extend, keeping alive the network of friendships that has shaped the exhibition.
