Architectural intervention and selected archival materials from Musée de l'Orangerie, 2025
The staircase of the Südgalerie unfolds as a threshold within Wassermusik—a space where architectures and temporalities fold into one another. In Gaillard’s work, the threshold is never singular: it refracts, juxtaposes, and confounds objects, associations, and events across time.
Suspended from the balcony, a glass vitrine presents photographs and shell fragments (1944-1980) selected by the artist from the archive of the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. Claude Monet began work on his monumental Nymphéas during the First World War, in response to the surrounding devastation. He later donated this work to the French state as a symbol of peace. Installed in its permanent home, the Orangerie des Tuileries, in 1927—a few months after Monet’s death—it is often regarded as one of the earliest site-specific works of modern art.
In August 1944, during the Liberation of Paris, artillery fire tore through the Orangerie’s roof, and splinters cut into the canvases. One of the paintings, Reflets verts, still bears this wound—an accidental mark inscribed on a meditation on water and light. The archival photographs selected by Gaillard follow this arc: intact halls, ruptured ceilings and torn paintings, then to the postwar reconstruction beneath a glass grid ceiling in the 1970s.
By setting this work in the architecture of Haus der Kunst, the artist connects the seemingly different but connected histories of war and events. Ceiling to ceiling, fracture to fracture. And between them, water—as force, image, memory—slips across both sites, a threshold in its own right.
The artist modified the lighting and ambience of the stairway by working with lights, and replacing ceiling panels bearing water-stain drawings, and other objects into the ceiling space. These water-stain drawings echo the scenes captured in the archival photographs from the Musée de l’Orangerie. On the marble floor below, the most enduring non-human witnesses reveal themselves—the ammonite fossils embedded in the stone, glimmering with splashes of water.