Pierre Huyghe

Pierre Huyghe (born 11 September 1962) is a French artist who works in a variety of media from films and sculptures to public interventions and living systems.

Pierre Huyghe (pronounced hweeg) was born in Paris in 1962. He lives and works in Paris and New York. He studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

He has had numerous international solo exhibitions at such venues as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2014); the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2014); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013-2014); the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico (2012); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain and the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2010); Tate Modern, London, England (2006); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2005); Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (2004); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and DIA Center for the Arts, New York (2003); the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2001); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2000); and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998).

He has also participated in a number of international art shows, including documenta XI (2002), XIII (2012); the Istanbul Biennial (1999); the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (1999); Manifesta 2, Luxembourg (1998); the 2nd Johannesburg Biennial (1997); and the Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyon (1995).

Huyghe has received a number of awards, including the Kurst Schwitters Prize (2015); Roswitha Haftmann Award (2013), the Smithsonian Museum’s Contemporary Artist Award (2010), the Hugo Boss Prize, Guggenheim Museum (2002), and a DAAD in Berlin (1999-2000). In 2002, Huyghe won the Hugo Boss Prize from the Guggenheim Museum and exhibited several works there the following year.

Huyghe has been working with time-based situations and has explored the exhibition process from the '90s. His works imply such diverse forms as living systems, objects, films, photographs, drawings and music. In recent years, he has created self-generating systems, including living entities and artifacts, in which emergence and rhythm are indeterminate and exist beyond our presence. Taking the exhibition and its ritual as an object in itself, Pierre Huyghe has worked to change the paradigm of this encounter, exploring the possibility of this dynamic experience.

The Third Memory

His two-channel video The Third Memory (1999), first exhibited in a museum context at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and The Renaissance Society in Chicago, takes as its starting point Sidney Lumet's 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino in the role of the bank robber John Wojtowicz. Huyghe's video reconstructs the set of Lumet's film, but he allows Wojtowicz himself, now a few dozen years older and out of jail, to tell the story of the robbery. Huyghe juxtaposes images from the reconstruction with footage from Dog Day Afternoon, demonstrating that Wojtowicz's memory has been irrevocably altered by the film about his life.

Timekeeper

No Ghost Just A Shell

In 1999, in collaboration with Philippe Parreno, Huyghe purchased the rights to a manga figure who they named 'Annlee' for $428. They invited other artists including Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Rirkrit Tiravanija to produce various works using Annlee. After several exhibitions, they transferred the character's copyright to the Annlee Association—a legal entity owned by Annlee, thus ensuring her simultaneous freedom and death.

L'Expédition Scintillante

Streamside Day

A Journey that Wasn't

The Host and the Cloud

Zoodram 4

Untilled

During dOCUMENTA(13), Pierre Huyghe created Untilled, a compost site within a baroque garden, a non hierarchical association that included a sculpture of a reclining nude with a head obscured by a swarming beehive, aphrodisiac and psychotropic plants, a dog with a pink leg, an uprooted oak tree from Joseph Beuys’ 7,000 Oaks among other elements. This growing system remained indifferent to the presence of the viewers that encountered the site. Both the dog, Human, and the sculpture with the beehive-head are part of the exhibition in Cologne.

Untitled (Human Mask)

Collaborations

In 2013, Huyghe contributed an aquarium that sustains an ecosystem of giant hermit crab and mineral landscape including floating rocks to fellow artist Piero Golia's Mountain School of Arts.