Jean-Michel Othoniel

JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL
11 JUNE – 9 NOVEMBER, 1997
French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel’s most recent works are on display in the garden of the Peggy
Guggenheim Collection, Venice.
Jean–Michel Othoniel, born in 1964, lives in Paris and New York. After working for ten years in a
variety of different media (painting, sculpture, performance, film, video), and different materials
(sulphur, wax, glass, poetry), he is now in the position of generating a personal language based on
his own ‘anatomy of desire’.
At the 1992 Kassel Documenta, he exhibited a series of sculptures in sulphur resembling orifices
which by their ambiguity destabilized the manichaeanism of gender. The same year, at the Musée
d’art Moderne of Saint-Etienne, as a play on the classical canons of art, he exhibited his largest
sulphur work, a hermaphroditic self-portrait. Three years later, at the Centre Georges Pompidou, he
presented a video installation entitled My Beautiful Closet, in which where a trick cupboard door
opens onto a bare hallway, allowing the viewer to comprehend the polarity of the exposition
«Feminine-Masculine». Again in 1995, in the context of a performance at the Fondation Cartier, the
exhibition space was transformed into a large «dark room» where dancers on film animated a place
of promiscuity, and where, once again, genders intermixed. The following year, as a resident of the
Académie de France in Rome, Othoniel created a CD ROM which seeks to retrace the history of the
first ten years of his art, from painting to photography, from sculpture to filmed performances.
Meanwhile, in 1993, he had begun working in glass at the CIRVA in Marseille. He then continued
to work in this medium in Brooklyn in 1994, and finally came to Murano.
Othoniel’s Murano production is on show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Ornament-action,
with both erotic and a sacred overtones, is the central theme. Necklaces, chains, crosses, and
desirable fruits snare the light of Venice and of its lagoon.
Peggy Guggenheim’s collection has influenced Othoniel’s ‘imaginaire’ over a long period. The
unruly transparency of Calder’s Mobile, the white sensuality of Arp’s bas-relief, the fragility of
Joseph Cornell’s mechanical boxes, and the aura of joy and generosity surrounding Peggy
Guggenheim herself, one of this century’s most remarkable artistic personalities of this century,
have all exerted an influence over him.
Othoniel’s installation of glass and crystal sculpture, discretely suspended from the trees, was
inspired by the garden itself. The successful outcome of the exhibition directly depends from the
sensitivity of Jean-Michel Othoniel working with one of the great master glass blowers of Murano,
Oscar Zanetti. This two-year long collaboration fostered both confrontation and exchange between
the savoir faire of an ancient tradition and the act of new creation. In her own time Peggy
Guggenheim had prompted and supported the collaboration between the artists she admired and the
master glass maker Egidio Costantini, whose small workshop Cocteau baptized the ‘Furnace of
Angels’.
In 1974 Peggy Guggenheim’s collection was exhibited at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris.
-1-
EXHIBITIONS 1992-1997
Jean-Michel Othoniel was born in 1964 in Saint-Etienne, France
1997
“Amour”, Fondation Cartier, Paris
Galerie Senda, Barcelona
Creative Time, New York
“Sous le Manteau”, Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Paris
“Crossing Hawaï”, Honolulu
1996
Arndt & Partner, Berlin
Fondation Opera Paese, Rome
Académie de France, Villa Medici, Rome
1995
Granmercy Park Hotel, Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, New York
Galerie Barbara Farber, Amsterdam
Pronton ICA, Amsterdam
Kohn Turner Gallery, Los Angeles
“Le ballet de l’innmommable”, Fondation Cartier, Paris
“Féminin Masculin, le sexe de l’art”, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris
Museum of Contemporary Art, Collection of the Fondation Cartier, Séoul
Fine Art Museum, Collection de la Fondation Cartier, Taïpei
“Fiction Non Fiction”, Printed Matter, New York
1994
“Of the Human Condition”, Vacoal Art Center, Tokyo
“Pour les Chapelles de Vence”, CAPC, Bordeaux
Film-performance, ARC (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris), Paris
“Un Fantôme dans votre bibliothèque”, Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris
“Gift”, Inter Art, New York
“Le Papillon sur la Route”, Palais des Arts, Toulouse
1993
Galerie Nicole Klagsbrun, New York
Galerie Michael Kohn, Los Angeles
Museo d’Historia de la Medicina de Catalunya, Galerie Senda, Barcelona
Galerie Senda, Barcelona
“L’Hermaphrodite”, Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne
“Hotel Carlton Palace, chambre 736”, organized by Hans-Ulrich Obricht, Paris
“L’autre à Montevideo”, Musée d’Art Visuel, Montevideo
“Azur”, Fondation Cartier, Jouy en Josas
1992
Biennale of Instambul
Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris
“Oh! Cet Echo!”, Centre Culturel Suisse Paris
Musée d’Art Contemporain de la Ville de Nîmes
“Riddeau”, installation at the theater of the Ferme Dubuisson choreography by Daniel Larrieu
“Regards multiples”, contemporary gallerie, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Documenta IX, Kassel
-2-
LIST OF WORKS
The works are made by the studio of the glass master Oscar Zanetti.
1. Le collier cicatrice
(The scar necklace)
hanging sculpture
necklace with rings of yellow amber, grey and red
coloured glass and cristal
100/40/8 cm
2. Le harnais
(The harness)
hanging sculpture
cross with cristal ring
80/50/7 cm
3. Objetrival
(Rivalobject)
hanging sculpture
orange brown pieces of blown glass with amber
yellow rings.
18/29/7 cm
4. Objet rival
(Rivalobject)
hanging sculpture
amber yellow pieces of blown glass with yell
red rings
12/27/9 cm
5. Objetrival
(Rivalobject)
hanging sculpture
grey-green pieces of glass and ambre yellow rings
14/23/10 cm
6. Objetrival
(Rivalobject)
hanging sculpture
amber yellow double piece of blown glass, amber
yellow and red rings.
12/27/9 cm
7. La croix
(The cross)
hanging sculpture
amber yellow blown glass and cristal rings
12/27/9 cm
8. Le rosaire
(The rosary)
hanging sculpture
amber yellow pearls and cristal
80/8/8 cm
-3-