Philippe Parreno to transform the entire Haus Der Kunst with fully driven AI exhibition. →

Philippe Parreno | FAD News

Philippe Parreno, My Room Is Another Fish Bowl, 2018, Helium–filled Mylar balloons, adhesive foil , air columns, Variable dimensions . Exhibition view : Philippe Parreno, Gropius Bau,Berlin (2018). Courtesy the artist; Pilar Corrias, London; Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. Photo © Andrea Rossetti

By Mark Westall

As part of a groundbreaking new collaboration with Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, Haus der Kunst, Munich’s global centre for contemporary art, will present a major exhibition by the internationally acclaimed French artist, Philippe Parreno, a multi-media, multi-sensory installation on a giant scale that will take over the entire gallery spaces from the end of November 2024.

Philippe Parreno has revolutionised the experience of museums. The exhibition will encompass Parreno’s key works and early works from the 1990s in multiple media ranging from video and sound to sculpture and drawing, created in collaboration with graphic designers, photographers, musicians, linguists, sound specialists, and actors, among others.

Throughout the exhibition, voices will play a fundamental role in bringing the building of Haus der Kunst to life. The Mittelhalle and Ostgalerie will become a resonating organism of light and sounds, featuring installations, films, new works and collaborations with peer artists.

Read More Here.

Philippe Parreno appointed Artistic Director of the 2025 Okayama Art Summit →

Philippe Parreno | Okayama Art Summit

Portrait of Philippe Parreno. Photo © Ola Rindal

The Okayama Art Summit Executive Committee (Chairperson: Masao Omori, Mayor of Okayama) appointed Philippe Parreno as the Artistic Director for Okayama Art Summit 2025, the international contemporary art exhibition which is held every 3 years in Okayama City, Japan, at its General Meeting held on October 24, 2023.
In addition, Shimabuku has been appointed as the Artistic Translator by Parreno. Parreno emphasized the importance of the new role of an "Artistic Translator" who shares the sense of the exhibition concept, in order to connect it with others. He recognized Shimabuku's familiarity with the direction of the artistic world and their existing relationship.

Read More About The Summit Here

Writing Practice: On Literature →

Philippe Parreno | ArtReview

Installation view: Philippe Parreno - Marilyn (2012).

By Adam Thirlwell

I have this feeling that everyone dislikes literature. Not reading and not writing, both of those are practices that many people enjoy; but somehow when these two come together they form literature, and then everyone dislikes it. I wonder why this is. I know that I want so much from this word literature. I want it to do so much work, whereas it mainly seems to do no work at all. It sounds dour and demented in a way that art doesn’t. Art sounds bright and fizzing and susceptible to anything new. Literature doesn’t. Literature sounds reactionary.

Maybe the better word for what I want is just writing and I should abandon literature as a word. If you plug literature into some game of word association, what would first come into my head is a line by Paul Verlaine that ends his poem ‘Art poétique’ (1874), a poem in which he defines what he wants from poetry, which seems to be music and the refusal of meaning. And then, devastatingly, he concludes: Everything else is literature, which still seems irrefutable in its dismissiveness.

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Espace Louis Vuitton München: Philippe Parreno

Philippe Parreno | Louis Vuitton

From February 17th through August 6th, 2023, the Espace Louis Vuitton München presents Marilyn, an exhibition dedicated to French artist Philippe Parreno as part of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Hors-les-murs” program.

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Philippe Parreno on bringing to life Goya’s ‘occult, weird’ Black Paintings →

Philippe Parreno | Financial Times

By Peter Aspden - July 15, 2022

Cosmic forces appear to be unleashed in the opening minutes of “La Quinta del Sordo”, a new film by the French artist Philippe Parreno now showing at the Prado Museum in Madrid. Amid an ominous ambient soundtrack, played through headphones, planets and stars appear to be on the move. A sinister organic form — is it a giant, sun-devouring creature? — comes out of the darkness. Specks of light flicker across the screen in super-slow-motion, and seem to explode.

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Accessibility Links Skip to content Search The Times and The Sunday Times New spectrum for Goya’s Black Paintings at the Prado Museum in Madrid →

Philippe Parreno | Times UK

By David Sharrock

When Goya painted his nightmarish Black Paintings directly on to the walls of his country retreat near Madrid he never intended them for public display.

An exhibition by Philippe Parreno, the French artist, has recreated the alarming experience of first viewing them inside the farmhouse, demolished long ago. The Black Paintings are among the most disturbing and priceless works of art housed by the Prado Museum in Madrid.

Goya’s horrific Black Paintings are brought to life – La Quinta del Sordo review →

Philippe Parreno | The Guardian

La Quinta del Sordo. Photograph: Otero Herranz, Alberto/© Museo Nacional del Prado

By Adrian Searle

“Parreno’s film oscillates between surface and depth, light and shadow; between sound and vision, the pictorial spaces Goya created and the walls of the rooms they originally covered. This oscillation continues, like a tilting gyroscope, between past and present. At the end of the film, we see a crossroads at dusk, street lights, a row of buildings. We hear the traffic and the screeching brakes of a local train taking a bend in the track.”

SHARJAH BIENNIAL REVEALS ARTISTS TAKING PART IN 2023 EDITION →

Philippe Parreno | Artforum

Organizers of the Sharjah Biennial have released the names of more than 140 artists participating in the event’s hotly anticipated 2023 iteration, conceived by the late Okwui Enwezor and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, which oversees the biennial. Artists from over seventy countries will be represented across sixteen venues scattered around the city, including a former kindergarten, a vegetable market, and a power station. The event is slated to take place February 7–June 11, 2023.

Philippe Parreno combines 20 years of footage to create ‘film of films, a seance of cinema’

Philippe Parreno | Wallpaper | By Tom Seymour

When Philippe Parreno was a teenager, he and his friends would sneak their way through the back door of an adult movie theatre in one of the seedier parts of Échirolles, a rough suburb of Grenoble, southern France. The backstreet XXX dive was called Cinema Permanente, because porn played all day, all night.

At a public talk at the 2019 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Parreno bashfully admits that watching the illicit movies acted as inspiration. In the dark, as the images writhed and morphed without sense of beginning, middle and end, so he formed his idea of what art should be. ‘We were always so alert, because we were scared of getting caught,’ he remembers. ‘But my sense of time became warped in the movie theatre. I started to think a permanent cinema is a beautiful idea.’

Parreno is here to present his new feature film, No More Reality Whatsoever, a combination of 20 years of disparate footage taken from dozens of art projects and edited together to create a ‘film of films, a seance of cinema’. The artist, who is 55, has the words ‘do so’ tattooed on his left wrist, a reference to the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson. He is soft-spoken, drinks tea over coffee, is dressed as if he might leave the cultured environs of the film festival for a quick hike along the canals of Rotterdam, and has a dry, self-deprecating sense of humour…

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Infinite Cinema: At The International Film Festival Rotterdam

Philippe Parreno | The Quietus | By Robert Barry

Nobody does 3D quite like Philippe Parreno. The French artist’s No More Reality Whereaboutsopens with the close-up face of Ann Lee, the anime character bought by Parreno and his compatriot Pierre Huyghe back in 1999. She self-referentially explains to us her own back-story (“I was bought for ¥46,000, paid to a design character company, K-Works…”), but, wearing 3D glasses, we see her face glitch and distort. Where a James Cameron or Joseph Kosinski might use the polarised glasses to more fully immerse their audience into their respective film worlds, to create a fuller, more lifelike cinematic experience; Parreno does exactly the reverse, using the stereoscope effect to jar and disturb, a high-tech verfremdungseffekt which feels like it is fucking directly with the cortical pathways between the eye and the brain.

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Edge of Visibility (Group Exhibition): Fiona Banner and Philippe Parreno at IPCNY

Philippe Parreno, Vermillon Sands, 2004

Fiona Banner and Philippe Parreno

Edge of Visibility

IPCNY

508 W 26th St, New York, NY 10001

4 October - 19 December, 2018

1301PE is pleased to announce that Fiona Banner’s Top Gun (1966) and prints from Philippe Parreno’s 2005 book Fade to Black including A Penny for Your Thoughts, Website, 2006 (2013), A Wise Chinese Monk Shitting Light, Lamp Prototype For Alejandro Jodorowsky 2006 (2013), and Vermillon Sands, 2004 (2013), will be on view from October 4th to December 19th, 2018 as part of the exhibition Edge of Visibility at International Print Center New York.

Edge of Visibility, curated in conjunction with the September-October issue of the journal Art in Print by its editor-in-chief Susan Tallman, focuses on low-visibility strategies in printmaking. With over forty works spanning the 17th century to the present, the exhibition features laborious microengravings and subtle watermarks to evanescent images printed with UV-reactive inks.

“Viewing,” says guest curator Susan Tallman, “is at the heart of this exercise—what it means to see, physically, metaphysically, socially, and politically.” In Philippe Parreno’s Fade to Black (2005), visibility and its opposite take on intimations of mortality: in normal light, the prints appear to be solid rectangles of color; when the lights are switched off, however, phosphorescent images bloom, only to die off into darkness until they are recharged.

The often laborious, multi-step processes inherent to printmaking allow artists to maintain visual clarity before subverting this visibility in the final image. Examples include the highly-detailed, nearly imperceptible details of Chris Ofili’s multi-layered, opalescent Black Shunga (2008-15), or Walid Raad’s refined Views from Inner to Outer Compartments (2013).

The visual hurdle posed by low-visibility prints urges viewers to be more conscious of their sight upon entering the exhibition space. Rare historical works of virtuoustic micrography by Levi David van Gelder, Johann Michael Püchler, and William Pratt, use minuscule text to create images, escaping the conventional dichotomy of text and image. Matthew Kenyon’s Notepad (2007) and Fiona Banner’s Top Gun (1996) bring the tradition of micrography into the present.

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Philippe Parreno at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin

Philippe Parreno

Gropius Bau Berlin

Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin, Germany

25 May - 5 August, 2018

Berliner Festspiele / Immersion presents internationally renowned artist Philippe Parreno at Gropius Bau Berlin, for his first solo exhibition at a major cultural institution in Germany.

Philippe Parreno's solo exhibition at the Gropius Bau has various different modes of existence that will change over time.

Some works reappear in in a mutated form.  Both film, "Anywhen" (2017) and "The Crowd" (2018) have been entirely re-edited.  The flower wallpaper, previously seen as a background element on the set of Parreno's film "Marilyn" (2012), comes to the fore as an individual work covering a gallery wall.  Hundreds of drawings of fireflies flash on a large LED screen and then fade away, their lifespan governed by algorithms.  This is an automaton made out of many others.  

Disembodied, free-floating sensations and intensities will directly affect the bodies of the works themselves and those visiting the show.  In one room, three different wind vortexes guide the circulation of balloon fish on an elaborate path.  Live sounds, emanating from somewhere in or beyond the city leak inside the museum walls and spread from one room to another.  

You will notice some synchronicities. Sounds re-surface in the reflecting pool of the atrium as they are transduced into visual patterns of water lilies. Light changes in the galleries as automatic blinds rise and fall, following a rhythm governed by an unknown authority.  Another area is bathed in an eerie orange glow that evokes the fictional future of our fading sun.  

As we move through the exhibit, we begin to feel as though we have entered a dimension not organized according to our normal spatial coordinates.  This is an inner space, a purely mental landscape, a site animated by fuzzy logic.  

In an isolated booth there is a bioreactor consisting of a beaker in which microorganisms multiply, mutate, and adapt to their environment.  Connected to computers that orchestrate the events in the exhibition, these yeast cultures develop a memory - a collective intelligence - that learns the changing rhythms of the show and evolves to anticipate future variations.  As the micro-organisms continuously interact with each other, and with the contingent events taking place in the museum, their neural circuitry sets a complex non-deterministic, non-linear mise-en-scene in motion through a series of non-periodic cycles. 

Immersion | Berliner Festspiele 2018

In the programme Immersion, the Berliner Festspiele present artistic works which often occupy the grey zone between performance and exhibition.  The programme Immersion was made possible by an initiative of the German Federal Parliament and thanks to the support of the Federal Goverenment Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

THE SEEN: Philippe Parreno, Two Automatons For One Duet // Art Institute of Chicago

Floating fish balloons are a mainstay in Paris-based artist Philippe Parreno’s current work—unable to be bound to any medium, the artist explores the object in the relationship to the space of an exhibition. Utilizing scientific technology in groundbreaking ways, Parreno most recently gave performative authority to a yeast colony in his 2017 show, La levadura y el anfi trión (The Yeast and The Host) at Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Last year marked three international solo exhibitions for the artist—Natalie Hegert sits down with Parreno to talk about his two recent exhibitions in 2018, at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin and the Art Institute of Chicago, in the context of the inescapable impermanence of the ‘permanent’ object.

Click here to download the complete interview by Natalie Hegert

Philippe Parreno was born in 1964 in Oran, Algeria. He graduated from École des Beaux-Arts de Grenoble in 1988 and in 1989 from Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In 2016, Parreno presented the Hyundai Commission in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London. He was the first artist to take over the entire 237,000 square foot space at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris with his exhibition Anywhere, Anywhere Out of the World which opened in October 2013. Major exhibitions of Parreno’s work include: Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2017); Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2017); Fundaciao de Serralves, Porto (2017); HangarBicocca, Milan (2015), Park Avenue Armory, New York (2015), CAC Malaga (2014), The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture 0 , Moscow (2013); Barbican Art Gallery, London (2013); Fondation Beyeler (2012); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2012); The Serpentine Gallery, London (2010); Witte de With (2010); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2009); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2009); Kunsthalle Zurich (2009); CCA Kitakyoshu, Japan (2006); Kunsthalle Zürich (2006); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2003); Musée D’Art Moderne de le Ville de Paris (2002), and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2001). Most recently, Parreno’s work was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, where his exhibition Two Automatons for One Duet was on view from February 3–April 15, 2018. He lives and works in Paris.

Philippe Parreno: Gropius Bau Berlin

Philippe Parreno, Untitled solo exhibition

Gropius Bau Berlin

Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin, Germany

25 May - 5 August, 2018

Philippe Parreno's untitled solo exhibition at the Gropius Bau Berlin has yet to exist and will perhaps never exist as it is described here.  This in not to say that it is any less real.  To be sure, this show has many different modes of existence, which, as of now, are purely virtual, sites of possibility which may or may not become actual.  To date, the exhibition exists in various modes that have changed over time including one which can be experienced through VR headsets.  Yet at this time, nothing appears fixed, the future that the exhibition takes remains open, and we can only imagine what Parreno intends to do.

View full press release

More information about the exhibition

Philippe Parreno: In Tune with the World, Paris France

Philippe Parreno: In Tune with the World

Fondation Louis Vuitton

8 Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi

 75116 Paris, France

11 April - 27 August, 2018

Throughout the galleries of the Frank Gehry building, "In Tune with the World" (11th April - 27th August 2018) unveils a new selection of artists from the collection, of several different mediums, bringing together modern and contemporary works, most of which have never before been exhibited in these spaces.

More than a simple hanging of works, "In Tune with the World" is intended to be an exhibition based on a specific theme. This reflects today’s questions about man’s place in the universe and the bonds that tie him to his surrounding environment and living world, highlighting the interconnections between humans, animals, plants, and even inanimate objects.

Philippe Parreno opens and closes the sequence at the pool level with two videos: the first, The Writer (2007) - at the entrance to gallery 1 - appropriates one of the first robots created in the eighteenth century, whilst Anywhen (2017) - in Gallery 3 - films an octopus responding to its environment, accompanied by a soundtrack inspired by James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

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San Francisco Chronicle: Philippe Parreno - Deftly Curated Images from singular RFK Funeral Train at SFMoMA

Deftly Curated Images from singular RFK Funeral Train at SFMoMA by Charles Desmarais

“The Train” launches from a noted series of documentary photographs made by Paul Fusco from the funeral train of Robert Kennedy, 50 years ago this June, as it passed along the corridor from New York to Washington, D.C. That keystone sub-exhibition is flanked by alternative interpretations of the same event.

In one direction in the galleries, a small but touching exhibition of amateur snapshots, collected by Dutch artist Rein Jelle Terpstra, presents the unvarnished reactions of bystanders. In the other, a sumptuous film by French contemporary artist Philippe Parreno re-creates the day as the kind of fiction that extends and enlivens fact.

Though none of the sub-exhibitions would be as good on their own as they are in tandem, Parreno’s film “June 8, 1968” (2009) is the strongest of the three legs. The artist rented a train and hired a troupe of actors to achieve it.

Beautifully recorded at high resolution (70mm), it is a precise re-enactment of the funeral train’s now-famous journey. Long shots of the various characters recall the Fusco originals, yet the rocking of the train, the wind in the figures’ hair or in the grasses around them, place them — situate us — somewhere different on the continuum between past and present, life and image.

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Artsy: The Art World’s Strangest New Trend—Fermentation

The Art World’s Strangest New Trend—Fermentation by Siobhan Leddy

Philippe Parreno recently filled the vast Turbine Hall at London’s Tate with his work Anywhen (2016–17). It featured yeast colonies, which Parreno turned into the conductors of an ever-changing symphony, enabling them to control a shifting constellation of objects, sounds, and lights. Roof sensors registered climatic conditions—whether heavy rain or, less likely in London, blistering sun—and fed the data back to the yeast through a computer. This was then relayed to the wire-suspended objects, setting them into motion. Through his bio-choreography, Parreno illustrated the interconnectedness of all things.

These artists are thematically and stylistically distinct from one another. Yet their experiments in fermentation point to a consistent desire to embrace our biological complexity and entanglement. The world is sticky and messy, ripe with a musty funk. We humans do not sit at the center of it all; we are one part of a grubby assemblage. We are plural rather than singular—and sipping on sour kombucha, or placing fat chunks of kimchi between our teeth, is a delicious kind of surrender.

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Philippe Parreno: Museo Jumex, Mexico City

Philippe Parreno
La levadura y el anfitrión (The Yeasts and The Host)
26 October 2017 - 11 February 2018

Museo Jumex
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 303
Colonia Granada
11520 Mexico City

Museo Jumex presents La levadura y el anfitrión (The Yeasts and The Host) the first exhibition in Mexico by French artist Philippe Parreno.

One of an influential generation of artists emerging in the 1990s, Parreno has pioneered new forms of art through collaboration, participation and choreographed encounters where "the exhibition is conceived as a scripted space, like an automaton producing different temporalities, a rhythm, a journey, a duration." His most ambitious installations have used systems to orchestrate the exhibition. These have included musical notations, weather patterns, and living organisms to trigger sound, video and lighting conditions within the gallery. For Museo Jumex, Parreno presents an expanded proposal over two floors. Combinations of new, existing and re-edited works are overlaid to produce different realities and experiences in an ever-changing composition.

At the centre of the exhibition, on the second floor of the museum, is the control centre. Here a bioreactor breeds yeast connected to a computer that remembers the program of a past exhibition (Anywhen, Parreno's Tate Modern Hyundai Commission 2016 in London). These living colonies are now exposed to a new context and are reacting to it. The dynamic systems trigger the order of appearances of events in the gallery space such as the projection of a film or the sound and light movements that reverberate throughout the building. By turning control of the show over to natural systems, Parreno's work explores the realm between the human mind (el anfitrión) - the host that choreographs the exhibition and other spectral forms of intelligent or emergent matter and activity.

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Jack Goldstein & Philippe Parreno: Field Guide, Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada

Field Guide
21 October 2017 - 25 February 2018

Remai Modern
102 Spadina Crescent East
Saskatoon SK S7K 0L3
Canada

Remai Modern's inaugural exhibition animates the entire museum with a spirit of active engagement, curiosity and disruption. Presenting a series of singular positions and coherent groupings of works, Field Guide introduces the museum's program philosophy and direction. Works from the permanent collection are placed in dialogue with contemporary projects, commissioned pieces and immersive installations. Through an open framework, Field Guide invites consideration of a network of issues and questions impacting art and society today.

Featuring leading artists from Saskatchewan, Canada, and the world, Field Guide rethinks the idea of "modern" from multiple cultural, geographic, historic and contemporary perspectives. Legacies play an important role and act as a formative nucleus for the exhibition—both the legacy of modernism and that of our predecessor the Mendel Art Gallery, from which Remai Modern inherited a collection of nearly 8,000 works. Field Guide also signals the start of a new chapter, debuting many key acquisitions that speak to the aspirations and future growth of the collection.

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