Galleria Continua, founded in 1990 in San Gimignano, Italy is celebrating 20 years of Galleria Continua in China with 15 different artists.
As a leading international contemporary art gallery, Galleria Continua was founded in 1990 by Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi and Maurizio Rigillo. It was the first foreign gallery with an international program to open in Beijing, China in 2004, and subsequently in 2007 launched a new site for large-scale creations – Les Moulins – in the Parisian countryside and in 2015 opened a space in La Habana, Cuba devoted to cultural projects designed to overcome every frontier.
In 2020, the same year as Galleria Continua’s thirtieth anniversary, a new space in Rome opened, dedicated to an open interculturality and new forms of dialogue and encounters between art and the public. In 2020, a space in São Paulo also opened, situated inside the Pacaembu sports complex. In early 2021 a new space opened in Paris in the heart of the Marais, just a few steps from the Centre Pompidou. In the same year, the gallery also inaugurated a space inside the most iconic hotel in the world, the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah in Dubai. In 2024, GALLERIA CONTINUA opened a third French space in the heart of Matignon, the historic epicentre of the art market in the west of Paris. And in 2025, Galleria Continua took a significant step forward in its journey in Brazil with the inauguration of its new space within the premises of the Santa Teresinha Parish in São Paulo, founded in 1925.
With almost 30 years of practice, Galleria Continua remains faithful to its spirit of perpetual evolution and committed to developing public interest in contemporary art through its two values, generosity and altruism. These two values, as well as the gallery’s close relationships to artist Chen Zhen and his wife Xu Min, led Galleria Continua to be the first major foreign gallery to arrive in China. The gallery is positioned in the famous 798 Art District, an area that used to be in the outskirts of the city and became since then one of the most visited places in China.
After 20 successful years, which include Galleria Continua’s participation in the first contemporary art fair in Beijing as well as the inaugural show featuring 16 artists from 5 continents, Galleria Continua in Beijing continues to bring important artists from all over the world for the first time to China.
To celebrate this 20th anniversary and look towards the future, the works of 15 artists are presented in a group exhibition. These artists have been part of this story along with major exhibitions that our space hosted for the first time here in China: Daniel Buren, Loris Cecchini, Chen Zhen, Antony Gormley, Gu Dexin, Kan Xuan, Anish Kapoor, Hans Op de Beeck, Giovanni Ozzola, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Qiu Zhijie, Tobias Rehberger, Serse, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu and Zhuang Hui.
Most importantly, the exhibition is consolidating and representing the ideology of the three founders, an ideology that has been the basis for the development and position of Galleria Continua in relation to the world around it, and its core value, as expressed in an interview by our founder Lorenzo Fiaschi on the occasion of the 25 year anniversary:
“For Mario, Maurizio and myself, culture is a meeting, it’s about making our differences a source of creativity, of beauty, of union and of love.”
