Christopher Taylor to Open a Paris Apartment Gallery with John Isaacs as Inaugural Exhibition

Christopher Taylor—curator, gallerist, and musician—will open a contemporary art gallery inside his own apartment at 124 Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris. The initiative revisits the domestic exhibition format that shaped his early career and extends a curatorial approach developed across earlier projects in London and New York. The program will present emerging and established artists in an intimate setting, positioning the apartment’s Baroque architecture as an active component of display rather than a neutral backdrop.

Taylor’s move consolidates several strands of his practice. In London, Museum 52 began as a living-space gallery and became known for presenting early work by artists who later gained broader visibility. In New York, he operated first under the Museum 52 imprint and then as American Contemporary, building a roster that included figures who went on to sustained institutional and market recognition. Across these ventures, Taylor worked with artists such as Shara Hughes, Conrad Shawcross, Esther Stocker, Kon Trubkovich, John Isaacs, and Nick Waplington. The Paris project returns to the scale and informality of those beginnings while drawing on the organizational discipline and network of his subsequent years in the United States.

The new space opens with John Isaacs: Ego in Arcadia. The exhibition reflects more than two decades of collaboration between Taylor and Isaacs, an artist associated with the Young British Artists generation whose work spans sculpture, painting, and installation. Isaacs often examines how images of the human body absorb and refract social pressures—including belief, consumption, and mortality—within a visual language that borrows from classical form and contemporary material culture. The show’s title adapts the memento mori “Et in Arcadia ego,” shifting its emphasis toward the self in an image-saturated present.

According to the gallery, Ego in Arcadia juxtaposes motifs from antiquity—mythic figures, anatomical fragments, and architectural references—with everyday objects and industrial components. The installation is conceived as a sequence of tableaux that treat the apartment as both site and subject. Moldings, patina, and circulation paths are integrated into the viewing experience rather than concealed. This approach aligns with Isaacs’s background in film and theater set design, informing the exhibition’s attention to framing, pacing, and calibrated decay. The result is a setting where the ideal and the provisional, the sacred and the commonplace, are held in deliberate tension.

Taylor frames the project as a platform for conversation as much as display. The domestic scale enables slower looking, narrows the distance between artwork and audience, and invites exchanges that can be difficult to stage in larger institutional contexts. While the program is not limited by geography or medium, it is oriented toward artists who engage current debates in contemporary art with formal rigor and conceptual clarity. The apartment format also creates a curatorial constraint—works must negotiate an inhabited space—which the gallery positions as a productive prompt rather than a limitation.

The choice of Isaacs for the opening underscores the gallery’s interest in long-term collaboration. Taylor has previously presented Isaacs’s work and situates the new exhibition within an ongoing dialogue about fragility, representation, and the afterlives of images. Within the apartment, this dialogue becomes spatial: the domestic setting stages how art might inhabit, rather than merely decorate, a lived environment. The installation’s attention to thresholds—between rooms, periods, and materials—mirrors its thematic concerns with inheritance and fragmentation.

Programming will extend beyond exhibitions to include small-format events that connect artists, writers, and audiences. The inaugural reception is planned for the building’s courtyard, and future public moments may incorporate live music and talks. Access will be by appointment as well as during designated public hours, reflecting the hybrid nature of a private home structured to accommodate visitors. The gallery’s communications emphasize accessibility within the limits of the site and a preference for focused visits that prioritize dialogue over volume.

Taylor’s initiative adds to a growing ecosystem of Paris spaces that experiment with scale, architecture, and audience. By foregrounding the domestic, it places emphasis on viewing as a social practice and on the capacities of a room—its proportions, surfaces, and acoustics—to shape interpretation. The opening exhibition introduces this methodology through a familiar partnership and a body of work that probes the boundary between image and object, ideal and ruin. The apartment’s historical details are not treated as decor but as co-authors of the display, asking viewers to consider how context informs meaning.

The gallery positions itself as a site where curatorial intent and lived space intersect, offering a model that is neither strictly institutional nor purely commercial. In doing so, it seeks to test how the circulation of artworks—and the conversations around them—can be reconfigured at a domestic scale without sacrificing critical ambition. With Ego in Arcadia, the opening chapter sets out the terms: a negotiation between permanence and impermanence, classical reference and contemporary immediacy, public encounter and private setting.

ohn Isaacs, Ego in Arcadia, 2025, silk screen print on canvas, glazed ceramic,24 carat gold leaf, steel, diptych, each panel 100 x 80 x 10 cm