Artist Paola Pivi has decided to break the rules of classical architecture — and she’s done so with a staircase over twenty meters long, completely immersed in a psychedelic palette. It’s called Untitled (project for Echigo Tsumari), and it’s the monumental intervention the Italian artist has brought to the Grand Palais in Paris for EUPHORIA: ART IS IN THE AIR, the exhibition celebrating the reopening of the iconic building.
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Paola Pivi’s multicolored staircase climbs from the ground floor to the upper levels, suspended like a daydream. In a single stroke, Pivi triggers a fascinating dissonance between the austere elegance of the palace and the visual irreverence of her impossible object. The result is a visual short-circuit that captures the gaze and sparks the imagination—like Alice truly ended up in Wonderland, but with European GPS coordinates.
As in many of her works, here too Paola Pivi plays with scale, color, and absurdity, turning the exhibition space into a place of ephemeral wonder. The installation seems to have no practical function, yet it invites climbing, discovery, and play. It’s an object suspended between sculpture and dream, between design and delirium.
Untitled (project for Echigo Tsumari) is on view until September 7th, and it’s absolutely worth a visit — to look up, get lost in color, and maybe return to childhood, even if just for a moment.
Read also: In Cremona there’s an upside-down helicopter inside a 17th-century church
Photo by Tanguy Beurdeley
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
