Cyprien Gaillard

Cyprien Gaillard’s work moves through cities and their fringes, treating entropy as a creative tool medium: he interprets erosion and accumulation as traces–not merely as signs of loss and decay. His works reject resilience as a framework for interpretation. Rather, they represent life in inhospitable places as something that simply persists–without commentary or judgement. At Kunsthaus Bregenz, Gaillard has installed, behind the exterior façade, a used construction chute through which the remains of demolished buildings have already been transported away on multiple occasions. The debris chute, made of orange tubes slotted together and suspended by chains, symbolizes disposal, deconstruction, destruction, and a never-ending process of renovation.

On the ground floor, we are greeted by Visitant, 2021–2026, a massive inflatable sculpture–a fleeting guest of sorts, a ghost with erratic gestures and no fixed form. Such figures are familiar to us from festivals, sports fields, or car dealerships. At Kunsthaus Bregenz, it dances to a choreography programmed by the artist and set to music played on the KILLASAN sound system—very influential in Berlin’s underground music scene–which was built in the 1990s for a nightclub in Osaka. Gaillard extracts the towering being from its usual context and places it in the foyer of Kunsthaus Bregenz–a space whose ascetic design stands for a contemplative engagement with art–here disrupted by the presence of the Visitant.

The hollow figure is in motion, inflating and collapsing, too large to stand fully upright: a mobile, externally controlled structure consisting solely of air and a nylon shell. Several times an hour, loud, piercing music kicks in, briefly creating a nightclub atmosphere. The Visitant is impressive both in its size and its surprisingly gentle movements.

A recurring theme in the exhibition are “deterrents”–measures designed to deter. In fact, public spaces are often shaped and controlled through deliberate interventions. Benches, fences, as well as lighting, sounds, and music are used in ways that welcome some people while keeping others at bay. Those already sidelined by society are thereby pushed even further to the margins. Power operates from behind the scenes, acting preventively and normatively. Gaillard is interested in the intersections of attraction and repulsion. Classical music played in public spaces, for instance, isn’t used to enhance cultural value, but deployed as a deterrent, a means of signaling who is welcome in that space and who is not. What is celebrated as high culture in a concert hall is used here, in Gaillard’s words, as a “soft weapon.”

On view on the first floor are new works combining photography, collage, and sculpture. They consist of groupings of nine Polaroids each, arranged in a diamond shape and resting on a piece of cardboard. Hanging on the wall and held taught by metal wire, the curvature forces them into a semi-upright position. This visual archive recorded by Gaillard on the now defunct Polaroid Spectra format until 2011 presents a kaleidoscopic view of familiar and unfamiliar places, preserved objects, and natural structures marked by human intervention. Polaroids by their very nature cannot be altered, giving them a forensic quality. Carefully assembled and presented without glass or any protective covering, the photographs reveal their fragility. They are both private observations and social testimonies of public institutions and cultural identity.

On the second floor Gaillard references the well-known German legend of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Here, the artist outfits flutes with banknotes with a value of zero euros, rolled up like cigarette paper or straws used for consuming drugs. These are genuine zero-euro banknotes issued by the European Central Bank, yet they hold no actual value–depicted on them are, among other things, the figure of the Pied Piper and the town of Hamelin. The image of music is thus linked to that of consumption and seduction, of value and deception, intoxication and repression.

Another work on this floor continues this line of thought. In it, fan-shaped, stainless steel sculptures curve out from the walls. Gaillard developed these objects, inspired by Italian sunshades for ATMs, in collaboration with a manufacturer of ATM accessories. Lying on the floor are ink cartridges and other components from damaged ATMs that were returned to the producer after being broken into. If an ATM is forcibly opened, they stain the bills blue, rendering the bills unusable. Just as the dismantled flutes point to an interrupted air circulation, the banknotes marked as stolen also signify an interruption in circulation. The focus is on the moment when value turns into worthlessness and the hidden violence that comes to light in the process.

“Public spaces are no longer places where people come together; instead, they’re increasingly becoming arenas of exclusion.”
Cyprien Gaillard

Displayed on the third floor is DETERRENT, 2026, a new work that Gaillard filmed in Los Angeles, as well as in various cities of Northern Europe. It was produced by Kunsthaus Bregenz in collaboration with the Fondazione Prada in Milan and is being shown for the first time in Bregenz. The film begins outside, in front of an American 7-Eleven convenience store where classical music is played loudly as a deterrent to loitering, before it moves onto scenes of whitewashed graffiti, drug-trafficking hotbeds, museum vitrines, the snow-covered architecture of Scandinavia, as well as the persistent motif of regulatory signage.

“The project focuses on the edges of the urban fabric, where control is most clearly visible. Along the concrete canals of the Los Angeles River, walls serve as boundaries between habitable and inhabitable space. The surfaces also become sites for graffiti–repeatedly covered up by thick layers of paint applied by the municipalities–that gives shape to an unintended visual language. Each act of overpainting suppresses expression while at the same time generating new forms. Erasure thus becomes a form of production in which the act of removal itself leaves traces as a collective fresco”
Cyprien Gaillard

Cyprien Gaillard (b. 1980 in Paris) lives in Paris and Berlin. His work has been shown in exhibitions at institutions worldwide, including Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2025–2026, OGR Torino in 2024–2025, the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, in 2024, the Palais de Tokyo & Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, and LUMA Arles, both in 2022, the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, in 2015, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, in 2015, MoMA PS1, New York, in 2013, the Kunsthalle Basel in 2010, MMK Frankfurt in 2010, the New Museum, New York, and Tate Modern, London, both in 2009. In 2010 Gaillard was the recipient of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, and in 2011 he was awarded the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art, Berlin.