Jean-Michel Othoniel

Du dessin à la sculpture, de l’installation à la photographie et de l’écriture à la performance, Jean-Michel Othoniel a, depuis la fin les années 1980, inventé un univers aux contours multiples.

Explorant d’abord des matériaux aux qualités réversibles tels le soufre ou la cire, il utilise le verre depuis 1993. Ses œuvres prennent aujourd’hui une dimension architecturale et rencontrent volontiers des jardins ou des sites historiques à travers des commandes publiques ou privées dans le monde entier.

Jean-Michel Othoniel is a major artist in the French and international artistic scene who because of his taste for metamorphoses, sublimations and transmutations, prefers materials with poetic and sensitive properties. From drawing to sculpture, from installation to photography, from writing to performance, the artist has invented a universe with multiple outlines since the late 1980s. He first explored materials with reversible qualities such as sulphur and wax, and has been working with glass since 1993. this is now his signature material. His works have a strong architectural dimension and are happily combined with gardens or historic sites following public or private commissions all over the world.

Metamorphoses, sublimations and transformations
In the early 1990s, Jean-Michel Othoniel favoured material with poetic and sensitive properties, and his first works, made of wax or sulphur, were presented by Jan Hoet at the 1992 documenta in kassel. The following year, he introduced glass in his work which really marked a turning point in his career.
While collaborating with the best craftsmen in Murano, he explored the properties of this material which then became his signature. the delicacy of glass and its subtle colours fuel the artist’s project to bring back poetry and wonder to the world. In 1994, he participated in the exhibition "Féminin/Mas-
culin" at the Centre pompidou in Paris, where he presented a series of works in sulphur as well as a performance installation My Beautiful Closet featuring dancers filmed in a dark cupboard. In 1996, he was granted a residency at the Villa Medicis in Rome. He then began creating works that interact with the landscape, suspending giant necklaces, for instance, in the Villa Medicis gardens; in the trees outside the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (1997); or at the Alhambra, palace of the Genera-Life in Granada (1999). Like forbidden fruits, his works are merged into the landscape and foliage as if
growing organically, absorbing shadows and diffracting the light.

Between museums and public spaces
In 2000, Jean-Michel Othoniel accepted his first public commission: transforming Palais-Royal – Musée du Louvre, the parisian subway station, a century after it was designed by Hector Guimard. In Othoniel’s installation,
Le kiosque des Noctambules, two glass and aluminium crowns conceal a
bench that invites random encounters while the city sleeps. From then on, his creations have been divided between public and museum spaces; site-specific works and exhibitions have given him many opportunities to experiment with the many possibilities his chosen materials offer and to develop his favourite themes. In 2003, for the "Crystal palace" exhibition presented at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in paris and the MOCA in Miami, he had blown-glass shapes made in Venice and at CirVA, the international Glass Centre in Marseille. These were designed to become enigmatic sculptures, in a realm of their own, between jewellery, architecture and erotic objects. the following year, in 2004, he was invited by the Louvre Museum to exhibit his work in the spectacular Mesopotamian rooms as part of the exhibition "Contrepoint". It offered him the opportunity to make his first free-standing necklaces, including the large-scale Rivière Blanche composed of beads adorned with nipples,
that was later acquired by the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris.

A traveling work
Since 1991, an opportunity for a long trip to Hong kong during which Jean-Michel Othoniel installed a temporary studio on the roof of the Museum of contemporary art to prepare the exhibition "too French", travelling has become a recurring theme in his work. He retains this this taste for nomadic creation,
producing pieces with glassblowers in Mexico, Japan and India. This idea of travel is also reflected in the project Le petit théâtre de peau d’Âne (2004, Centre Pompidou collection), inspired by small puppets found in the house of the great traveller Pierre Loti and presented on stage at the Théâtre de la Ville in Rochefort then at the théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Cultivating the art of reconciling opposites, the artist creates a dialogue between poetic and politics,
in his Bateau de larmes (Boat of tears): this tribute to exiles is produced from a Cuban refugee boat, found in Miami, covered with cascading colourful beads, transforming into huge crystal clear tears, this artwork is exhibited at Art Unlimited 2005, in the pond located in front of the entrance of the Basel exhibition. During a stay in India in 2010, he works with glassmakers in Firozabad with whom he produces a series of works presented the following year at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in his exhibition "My Way". retracing his artistic career path since leaving the École des Beaux-arts in
Cergy-pontoise in 1988 up to his latest works of art, this retrospective relates the multiplicity of his practices and inspirations. After Paris, "My Way" was presented in 2011 at the Leeum samsung Museum of Art/Plateau in Seoul, then in 2012 at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, at the Macao Museum of Art in Macao and at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

Interacting with history and the contemporary
In 2012, an invitation from the Eugène Delacroix Museum and studio in Paris enables Jean-Michel Othoniel to engage with this place steeped in history, through a series of sculptures inspired by the structure of the flowers and plates in his Herbier Merveilleux – a publication in which he explores the symbolism of flowers through texts and watercolours. From installation to commission, the artist creates works of art that reflect the beauty of a location and extend its magic. In spring 2013, for its 10th anniversary the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo commissions Kin no Kokoro, a monumental heart of gilded bronze beads permanently installed in the Japanese Mohri Garden, thus offering him an opportunity to orchestrate an encounter between the recurring themes in his work and far eastern sacred symbolism. the same year, as part of the development along the banks of the Saône in Lyon, on the former Caluire lock he creates a belvedere formed of coloured glass beads that reflect the lanterns on Île Barbe opposite. 2014 is marked by an outstanding project: the redevelopment of the Water theatre grove in the gardens of the palace of Versailles with the landscape designer Louis Benech. For this commission,
awarded after an international competition, Jean-Michel Othoniel creates three fountain sculptures in gilded glass, based on choreographies by the dancing master of king Louis XIV, Raoul-Auger Feuillet. At Versailles the artist discovers unprecedented prestige and scale and with Les Belles Danses (the Beautiful Dances) producing the first permanent commissioned work within the palace by a contemporary artist. Developed like an architectural project, these three fountain sculptures reflect several of the main orientations recently adopted by the artist: the monumental dimension and the relationship to history that increasingly highlight his originality. In 2016, Jean-Michel Othoniel revealed
The Trésor of the Angoulême’s Cathedral a monumental artwork of spectacular theatricality he worked on for more than eight years.
Regularly invited to create artworks in situ, interacting with historical places, Jean-Michel Othoniel also likes to encounter today’s architecture. He has therefore repeatedly created sculptures for Peter Marino and Jean Nouvel.

Jean-Michel Othoniel is represented by several galleries: Perrotin (Paris, New York & Hong kong); Karsten Greve (Cologne and saint-Moritz); Kukje (seoul).

His works are conserved in the greatest museums of contemporary art, foundations and private collections in the world.