LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents Pierre Huyghe, the artist’s first retrospective in the United States, bringing together approximately 60 works from the past 25 years. Huyghe’s diverse practice includes live situations, exhibitions, films, objects, and drawings. Huyghe often collaborates with specialists in other fields such as science, literature, film, music, and architecture.
In search of what the artist has termed a “non-knowledge zone,” Huyghe approaches an existing system—such as an institution, a situation, or an area of knowledge—and creates a speculative proposition: a “what could be.” Influences and role-playing are the materials with which Huyghe works.
Taking the exhibition and its rituals as an object in itself, Huyghe explores the possibilities of this dynamic experience and the mise-en-scène of its boundaries. To that end, he has constructed time-based situations, where live events unfold according to a program or score. Most recently, his projects take the form of a self-generating network in which emergences and rhythms are indeterminate and exist beyond our presence.
Jarrett Gregory, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA, says, “Through his events and encounters, Huyghe upends the expectation that art is a discrete work exhibited for a specific time. His practice embraces temporality; contingent objects, animals, machines and humans become understood as durational, rather than static entities. The resulting exhibition forms a network that, while populated by Huyghe’s objects and ideas, lives on beyond his supervision.”
"Pierre Huyghe's work is by turns surprising and captivating," says Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. "He is one of the most significant artists currently working on an international stage, and we are thrilled to be the only U.S. venue for this imaginative retrospective."
The exhibition emphasizes the living dimension of Huyghe’s propositions, which envision the space as a world, evolving according to its own rhythms. Rather than displaying a selection of objects, the exhibition explores the porosities and the intensities that arise between elements.
The encounters that occur in Pierre Huyghe are not choreographed but unplanned; in what he refers to as an “auto-generative system,” the artist constructs a set of conditions and allows events to unfold following their own course. Exemplifying Huyghe’s unique methodology, multiple elements from his 2012 installation at dOCUMENTA (13) will have their U.S. debut in this exhibition, including Human, a white Ibizan hound, and the film A Way in Untilled, which was filmed on site in Kassel, Germany. In addition, the exhibition will include the world premiere of a new aquarium and the U.S. premiere of the film Untitled (Human Mask).
Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962, Paris) was educated at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. He has had numerous international solo exhibitions at venues such as Museum Ludwig, Cologne; (2014); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City (2012); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Art Institute of Chicago (2010); Tate Modern, London (2006); Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2005); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2003); Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2001); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2000); and Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998). In 2001 he represented France at the 49th Venice Bienniale with his exhibition Le Château de Turing and won the Special Jury Prize. Huyghe has also participated in a number of international art shows, including dOCUMENTA (13) (2012); Documenta (11) (2002); the Istanbul Biennial (1999); the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (1999); Manifesta 2, Luxembourg (1998); and the second Johannesburg Biennial (1997). He was the recipient of the Roswitha Haftmann Award (2013), the Smithsonian American Museum’s Contemporary Artist Award (2010), the Hugo Boss Prize (2002), and was a DAAD Artist-in-Residence in Berlin (1999–2000).
