PRESS RELEASE
Everything I Envisioned Happened
Aug 29 – Oct 31, 2026
FLÁVIA JUNQUEIRA
August 29 through October 31, 2026
Reception with the artist: Saturday, August 29, 6 to 8 PM
Contessa Gallery, 9 Main Street, Southampton, New York
Contessa Gallery is pleased to present Everything I Envisioned Happened, an exhibition of photographs and an immersive installation by the Brazilian artist Flávia Junqueira, on view in Southampton from August 29 through October 31, 2026.
Junqueira works inside rooms built to hold ceremony. Palaces, opera houses, botanical gardens, civic halls - spaces designed to impress and to outlast the people who move through them. Into these she introduces thousands of balloons, floods the architecture with color and weightless material, photographs it once, and takes it all down. The photograph is what remains.
The tension in her work is deliberate. Architecture meant to convey permanence is set against something that will not survive the week, and the images that result are celebratory and elegiac at once, catching the moment just before the air leaves the room. Her subjects include the Château de Fontainebleau, the Eiffel Tower, the Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro, and Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace. In 2022 she became the first artist to stage an intervention of this kind in a European theater, transforming Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu with approximately 1,500 balloons.
For this exhibition Junqueira travels from São Paulo to build an installation inside the gallery itself, making Southampton the newest room to join that list. The artist will be present for one evening only, Saturday, August 29, from 6 to 8 PM.
Junqueira holds a degree in Visual Arts from Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado and a master’s degree in Visual Poetics from the University of São Paulo. Her work is held in the collections of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, MAR - Museu de Arte do Rio, MIS São Paulo, MAB-FAAP, the Museu do Itamaraty, Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz, and the World Bank.
All works are available for acquisition. For inquiries, please contact the gallery at (216) 382-7800 or art@contessagallery.com.