Jean-Michel Othoniel

In 2011, an important exhibition held at the Centre Pompidou Paris presenting the entire gamut of his artistic practice retraced his career. This exhibition, “My Way”, was then staged at the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art/Plateau, Seoul, at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, at the Macao Museum of Art, Macao, and at the Brooklyn Museum of New York. In 2012 an invitation from the Musée Delacroix in Paris offered an opportunity to instigate a dialog with this studio-museum laden with history, by means of a series of sculptures and plates from his Herbier Merveilleux. In spring 2013, the Mori Art Museum of Tokyo has ordered from him a new piece of work for its 10th anniversary, Kin no Kokoro, a monumental work of art located in the Japanese Garden Mohri Garden. On March 12, 2015, Jean-Michel Othoniel will open a new exhibit, Secret Flower Sculptures, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, that will then travel to San Francisco in Autumn. In May 2015, Jean-Michel Othoniel revealed Les Belles Danses, three sculptures installed on the ponds of the new Water Theatre grove created by the landscape designer Louis Benech. The design was inspired by a dance script that the artist found in Raoul Auger Feuillet’s book Choregraphie, ou, L’art de décrire la dance, par caracteres, figures, et signes démonstratifs (1700). It will be the first permanent commission in the gardens of the Palace since Louis XVI.

For the Unlimited Section at Art Basel 2005, Jean-Michel Othoniel showed The Boat of Tears in a pool located in front of the fair. The artist, whose works often combine the political and the intimate, salvaged a boat built by Cuban boat people and abandoned on the shores of Miami and used it as a basis for his work. A crown, chains and necklaces made of colored glass taper down into giant tears of clear crystal. The sculpture floats on the water like a ghost ship, loaded with tears of suffering and joy, overflowing with memories and covered by festive ornaments.

In December 2004 in art, at the Théâtre de la Ville in Rochefort and later at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, Jean-Michel Othoniel staged Le Petit Théâtre de Peau d’Ane, an installation composed of four lacquered wooden sideboards, surmounted by thirty-five glass-filled models, and as many globes or huge vertugadins embroidered with gold and sequins. This installation was conceived as a decor for the tiny puppets that Pierre Loti used to play with as a child, and that Othoniel discovered in the house of this famous French writer. Also in 2004, for the exhibition Contrepoint at the Louvre Museum, Jean-Michel Othoniel set his works in the museum’s spectacular Mesopotamian rooms. His monumental glass and aluminum sculptures, which are always created in relation to the places in which they are shown, acquire a timeless and peaceful dimension. The great white river of pearls adorned with nipples, which was purchased by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, is now on view in the museum’s new collection display.

In 2000, a century after Hector Guimard, Jean-Michel Othoniel transformed the Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre into the Kiosque des Noctambules: two crowns made of glass and aluminum conceal a bench designed for chance encounters in the sleepy city. In 2003, Jean-Michel Othoniel conceived Crystal Palace for the Cartier Foundation in Paris and for MOCA in Miami. For Crystal Palace, he asked glassblowers in Venice and at Marseille’s CIRVA to create forms that would ultimately become enigmatic sculptures standing between jewelry, architecture and erotic objects.

In 1996, Othoniel hung gigantic necklaces in the bamboo gardens of the Villa Medici in Rome, and later in the trees of the Venetian garden of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (1997), and at the Alhambra and Generalife, in Granada (1999). Similar to a forbidden fruit, the necklace has a life in and of itself: it merges into the landscape and the leaves, like organic outgrowths absorbing shadows and diffracting light. The notion of wound or injury is at the heart of his work. In 1997, Othoniel created Collier Cicatrice, a small necklace made of red glass that the artist offers to whoever wants to wear it with pride.

In 1994, he participated in the exhibition Féminin/Masculin at the Pompidou Center in Paris, with an installation entitled My Beautiful Closet, a mise-en-scène of dancers filmed in the darkness of a closet.

In 1993, Jean-Michel Othoniel introduced glass into his work and began to explore its properties. Transformations, mutations of materials, and rites of passage from one state to another echo an essential rite in the artist’s work: that of journeys and memory.

An artist who has a passion for all sorts of metamorphoses, sublimations and transmutations, Jean-Michel Othoniel has a predilection for materials with reversible properties. Othoniel first gained recognition with a series of sculptures made of sulfur, exhibited at Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992.

Jean-Michel Othoniel is a contemporary artist born in 1964 in Saint-Etienne (France). He lives and works in Paris.