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.
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 Istanbul
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
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. Objetrival (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