Pierre Huyghe, Centre Pompidou, through 6 January, 2014
The Centre Pompidou presents the first retrospective exhibition of the work of French contemporary artist Pierre Huyghe, bringing together 50 of his projects spanning over the last 20 years. Huyghe's artwork balances on the border between fantasy and reality, constantly challenging our generally accepted ideas and notions about the world. Living things (crabs, bees, spiders and much more) are integral "inhabitants" of his art and have been placed there by Huyghe as actors in his plays. In one sense the artist determines the rules of the game, but in another sense he allows them absolute freedom to just be. Huyghe's exhibitions resemble a surreal dream in which everything is in a continual fluidity and nothing stays the same from one moment to the next. His exhibitions create in the viewer a light euphoria of emotions similar to dizziness and bring the viewer into territory where he or she wanders like a child looking for adventure, not unlike Alice in Wonderland. Water that falls from the ceiling like a waterfall...and then turns into smoke. A pile of pink sand without borders that slowly spreads across the room. A light installation that follows people's movements as they control the lights by remote control -- like in a computer game. A woman lounging on a concrete pedestal (Untitled, 2012), except that her head is a swarm of bees that constantly changes shape as the bees move around -- apparent chaos that is actually the flawless order of the world of bees. One of the most memorable pieces in the exhibition is the live hermit crab in an aquarium that spends its days slowly moving around its craggy underwater world carrying a golden house on its back, but the house is in the shape of Brancusi's famous Sleeping Muse. The image in the aquarium changes depending on where the viewer stands, making it look like the crab lives several different lives. Does the crab realise that his house and he himself is a work of art? And what can we learn of bees and the rules of a swarm? Huyghe provokes and poses questions. As he said in an interview in The Art Newspaper, "I'm interested in how to quantify the different variations of being alive...how to intensify the presence of things. I look at how things change, are transformed or metabolise."
19 rue Beaubourg
Paris 75004
www.centrepompidou.fr
10/2013
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