Pierre Huyghe Selected Press Galerie Chantal Crousel «Sprengel Museum Hannover presents work by Kurt Schwitters Prize winner Pierre Huyghe», artdaily.org, February, 2016. http://artdaily.com/news/84709/Sprengel-Museum-Hannover-presents-work-by-Kurt-Schwitters-Prize- winner-Pierre-Huyghe#.VrXY0vGAGwa Sprengel Museum Hannover presents work by Kurt Schwitters Prize winner Pierre Huyghe Pierre Huyghe, Players, 2011. Mask, LED lights, brass. 50 masks are worn by humans. Galerie HANNOVER.- Pierre Huyghe (born 1962, Paris), the winner of the 2015 Kurt Schwitters Prize awarded by the Lower Saxony Sparkassen Foundation, presents his new exhibition Orphan Patterns in Chantal Crousel the extension of the Sprengel Museum Hannover. The title Orphan Patterns encompasses ideas found in the field of computability and biology, game stu- dies or in any form of lineage. Huyghe has developed a ritualistic path through the new ten exhibition halls of the museum where the visitor wanders, with sequences of appearance and disappearance, different in both time and individual response. As in the artist’s previous situated works, in a compost of simple process, a set of circums- tances and conditions, animals, humans, machines evolve and unpredictability emerges. In the entrance, sediments from the walls of various museums, particles of matter from previous exhi- bitions, for example the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), are spread like semen on the floor of the virgin museum. The next rooms will be soiled by the ones who cross them. A dice carved in amber contains two mating insects randomly captured and stopped in their reproduc- tion and lifetime millions years ago. Alive descendants of the same species are growing and flying by thousands in the space, genetically modified. «Sprengel Museum Hannover presents work by Kurt Schwitters Prize winner Pierre Huyghe», artdaily.org, February, 2016. http://artdaily.com/news/84709/Sprengel-Museum-Hannover-presents-work-by-Kurt-Schwitters-Prize- winner-Pierre-Huyghe#.VrXY0vGAGwa A human couple wearing light masks, that attract the photosensitive insects, play with the dices and fol- low their instructions. Their light exchange is programmed according to instinct behaviours, sequences of seduction signal, bioluminescent flash pattern that insects emit prior copulation.Aside the Mating Masks, there is Orphan, a light mask with an auto-generative and chaotic program. The next appearance, the film De-extinction, presents a macroscopic navigation through a stone, in search of the earliest mating scene, an instant frozen in time inhabited by entities suspended in their activity, almost alive in their presence. A swarm of people with light masks at different intensity roam in one space on the opening day. The interaction of art and life, which has been central to the Merzkunst of Kurt Schwitters, is found in Huyghe’s dynamic network of heterogeneous animated elements, in the co-activity between animal, human being, artifact and machine. These cultural foundations, in connection with the movement of living entities and the uncertainty of a time axis, form the basis for the French artist’s striking and meti- culously set environments. Huyghe’s work has been most recently exhibited in a 2013-2015 retrospective at the Centre Georges Galerie Pompidou, Paris, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los An- geles, and in 2015 for the Roof Garden Commission at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His contribution to dOCUMENTA(13), with his project Untilled (2012) in the Karlsaue Park, was one Chantal Crousel of the exhibition most important work. He has received the Special Jury Prize for the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2001), the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2002), the Smithsonian Museum’s Contemporary Artist Award (2010) and the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, Zurich (2013). Ana Teixeira Pinto. «The post human animal», Frieze, n°19, May, 2015, pp. 72 - 77. Galerie Chantal Crousel Ana Teixeira Pinto. «The post human animal», Frieze, n°19, May, 2015, pp. 72 - 77. Galerie Chantal Crousel Ana Teixeira Pinto. «The post human animal», Frieze, n°19, May, 2015, pp. 72 - 77. Galerie Chantal Crousel Ana Teixeira Pinto. «The post human animal», Frieze, n°19, May, 2015, pp. 72 - 77. Galerie Chantal Crousel Ana Teixeira Pinto. «The post human animal», Frieze, n°19, May, 2015, pp. 72 - 77. Galerie Chantal Crousel Ana Teixeira Pinto. «The post human animal», Frieze, n°19, May, 2015, pp. 72 - 77. Galerie Chantal Crousel Jennifer Higgie. «One take», Frieze, n°168, January-February 2015, pp. 88-89-90-91. Galerie Chantal Crousel Jennifer Higgie. «One take», Frieze, n°168, January-February 2015, pp. 88-89-90-91. Galerie Chantal Crousel Jennifer Higgie. «One take», Frieze, n°168, January-February 2015, pp. 88-89-90-91. Galerie Chantal Crousel Jennifer Higgie. «One take», Frieze, n°168, January-February 2015, pp. 88-89-90-91. Galerie Chantal Crousel Jason Farago. “Pierre Huyghe at Lacma - a sometimes baffling but always engaging retrospective”, The Guardian, December 4, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/dec/04/pierre-huyghe-lacma-retrospective LA is the ideal location for a Pierre Huyghe retrospective – the artist’s baffling and borderless installations fit right in with the city’s chaotic character. Galerie Pierre Huyghe’s work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Photograph: Lacma Chantal Crousel Los Angeles is a city where there’s no border between reality and artifice. Images here have lives their own. It’s hard to think of a better city in which to encounter the art of Pierre Huyghe – an artist whose fictions gives rise to realities, whose sometimes baffling, always engaging art turns real life into a dream, and vice versa. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, he has just opened his first American retrospec- tive, a festive, unfathomable, profoundly ambitious exhibition that was first seen at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In his hometown it defied expectations to become one of that museum’s best attended shows of a living artist in years. It seduces, it beguiles, it obfuscates, it amazes. It challenges the most fundamental assumptions about what a museum show can be. By the end of my first visit I found myself unready to leave; I rushed back the next day, impatient to throw myself again into Huyghe’s universe of monkeys and marine life, ice rinks and steam machines, voyages to Antarctica or the moon. This is a show that rewards, perhaps even requires, repeat visits. It earns them. Jason Farago. “Pierre Huyghe at Lacma - a sometimes baffling but always engaging retrospective”, The Guardian, December 4, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/dec/04/pierre-huyghe-lacma-retrospective Huyghe, born in Paris in 1962, is one of the most significant artists of the last quarter-century. He’s a polymath, and his art ranges from dystopian films infused with science-fiction elements to gardens full of poisonous plants. But the strength of his art did not guarantee the strength of this retrospective. On the contrary, a Huyghe retrospective is almost a contradiction in terms. One of the critical moves he and his fellow artists made in 1990s France was to shift their em- phasis from making discrete artworks to fully composed exhibitions, or experiences in the real space of the gallery. Relational aesthetics, as this tendency was imprecisely christened, was an art of specific encounters and time-based interactions, much harder to preserve than a stable painting or sculpture. How do you re-present those without ossifying them? The answer here is through a total redeployment Huyghe’s art, installed so that works bleed into one another, for an experience that’s partly choreographed and partly left to chance. All the strings are visible, yet it remains cloaked in mystery. There are funny emphases, like an early Super-8 travelogue never seen before, and intentionally gaping holes. Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” might start blaring from one gallery while you’re contemplating a puppet show featu- ring a dancing Le Corbusier. Sounds chaotic? It is, in places. But the more accurate word might be alive. Works familiar to those who’ve followed Huyghe’s career reappear here in new forms, or else slip off the screen into the gallery. In 2001 Huyghe turned the illuminated drop ceiling of Galerie France’s Venice Biennale pavilion into Atari Light, a giant game of Pong that visitors could play with joysticks. Here it is again, though one of the lights is broken, and tropical plants have sprou- Chantal Crousel ted beneath. (I lost, by the way.) A black ice rink that, fifteen years ago, hosted a figure skater carving tracks now has no skater, but globs of tar from the prehistoric La Brea pits outside the museum. A performer wearing a LED-covered mask might walk past you. If he looks familiar, it’s because you just saw him in one of Huyghe’s films, wearing the same getup. To historians, the LACMA show’s leapfrogging of these key works and others will be a torment. These were the videos by which Huyghe, alongside his colleagues Philippe Parreno and Domi- nique Gonzalez-Foerster, reestablished France as a leader in contemporary art after decades in the shadow of first Germany, then the UK. Huyghe, however – working with the young curator Jarrett Gregory, one of many talented New Yorkers who’ve skipped town for LA in recent years – is playing a bigger game than just a historical recap. The exhibition is itself a medium for the artist. It’s a fractal reproduction of the works it contains. It unfolds in every direction at once, and changes everyday, thanks to performers both human and animal. Videos and light works are on timers: they flicker on and off, stop and restart.