Galleries in Paris » Jean-Michel Othoniel

OTHONIEL – PERROTIN

Galleries — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 13:18:34 +0000

Jean-Michel Othoniel’s enchanting aesthetics revolves around the notion of emotional geometry. Through the repetition of modular elements such as bricks or his signature beads, he creates exquisite jewelry-like sculptures whose relationship to the human scale ranges from intimacy to monumentality. His predilection for materials with reversible and often reflective properties—particularly blown glass, which has been the hallmark of his practice since the early 1990s—relates to the deeply equivocal nature of his art. Monumental yet delicate, baroque yet minimal, poetic yet political, his contemplative forms, like oxymorons, have the power to reconcile opposites. While his dedication to site-specific commissions for public spaces has led some of his work to take an architectural and social turn, Othoniel’s holistic sensibility compares to fêng shui, or the art of harmonizing people with their environment, allowing viewers to inhabit his world through reflection and motion.

OTHONIEL – PERROTIN

Galleries — Sat, 18 May 2019 12:34:29 +0000

‘And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. And they said, Go to, let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.’ From Genesis to the histories of Herodotus, between history and myth, the Tower of Babel and its destruction have fired the imagination. What remains of this ziggurat, this architectural utopia and symbolic link between heaven and earth? What happened to the millions of bricks used to erect it? What new utopias were built on the ruins of that thwarted aspiration? These are the questions that underlie Jean-Michel Othoniel’s latest works, presented for the first time at Galerie Perrotin in Paris. For this exhibition, which brings together fifteen minimalistic, enigmatic sculptures made of glass or metal bricks, the artist has systematized the use of a module that entered his work in 2009, after a journey to India. On the road from Delhi to Firozabad, a city with an age-old glassmaking tradition, he was struck by the stacks of bricks accumulated in the hope of building a house and by the countless altars covered in offerings and multicoloured necklaces. Since then, he has called on the knowledge of Indian glassblowers to blow blue, amber, yellow and grey glass bricks. A modular element – like the glass beads that have been his hallmark since 1993 – brick has led Jean-Michel Othoniel towards more refined, more radical works, somewhere between sculpture and architecture, enabling a new monumentality inaugurated with Precious Stonewall (2010), a gigantic monolith covered in necklaces, and developed, more recently, with the impressive Big Wave (2018), which measures 15 metres long and 6 metres high. In brick, the artist has found a universal element, a common denominator between cultures and one that has traversed the history of humanity. Feeding his latest research and generating material for new ‘obsessions’, brick enables him to reach the architectural scale he was aiming for and to try out cantilevered constructions, to go beyond the idea of sculpture, to invent a new relation to space, to rethink the embedding in the landscape, to radicalize his relation to geometry or to create places – grottoes, paths, walls, agoras – that set out a different relationship to the body, thereby synthesizing the recurrent themes of his oeuvre. If, for his exhibition at Galerie Perrotin in New York in March 2018, glass-bead sculptures and drawings were engaged in a dialogue with brick works, Othoniel has here chosen to concentrate exclusively on this new serial element in glass or stainless steel through abstract, monochrome propositions close to the language of minimalist art.

OTHONIEL – PERROTIN

Galleries — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 14:38:56 +0000

JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL “Les Noeuds de Babel” is Jean-Michel Othoniel’s fifth solo exhibition at Galerie Perrotin.
For this exhibition, Jean-Michel Othoniel presents four new monumental sculptures and watercolour sketches inspired by Brancusi as well as the colours and forms of Italian Mannerism to the Baroque, developping “the question of the lost body. It’s a matter of creating a volume of absence, constructions with variable dimensions where bodies could nest… There is the idea that there is a body at the center… This refers to the idea of the haloes and aureoles of my earlier sculptures. In my last sculptures, there is something like a body at the center and a knot around; the knot organises itself around an axis and defines a void”. These artworks materialized the psychoanalytic theory of the Borromean rings that structures a subject with a fragile equilibrium between Reality, Symbolic and Imaginary but seem to have been distorted here by an invisible dynamic, capturing the abstract essence of the movement.
Echoed by five mural pieces made of glassbricks, ”Precious Stonewall”, refers to minimal art by metonymy of the eponymous monumental work shown recently during the retrospective “My Way” at the Centre Pompidou and the Brooklyn Museum. These were produced in India at Firozabad and suggest at the same time the visible pile of bricks on the Indian roads and the numerous altars covered with gifts, jewelry and flower necklaces… They also refer to the Stonewall riots of 1969 in Greenwich Village that led to the birth of the Gay Rights Movement. The silence emanating from these works renders them eloquent pieces. The ambiguity of the artist’s works also lays in the equivocal nature of the glass, sacred, refracting a divine light, as stained-glass would in a church, or a secular one, symbolizing the transparency of desire when it becomes a mirror.
The retrospective “My Way” has led to the rediscovery of the artist’s protean work: performances, films, paintings, drawings, glass sculptures, sulfur, wax etc. It has travelled around the world, in 2011 at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, at the Plateau/Leeum Samsung Museum, Seoul; in 2012 at the Hara Museum, Tokyo, at the Macau Museum of Art, Macau and at the Brooklyn Museum, New York. This tour gave rise to a number of prestigious commissioned works: “Le Noeud de Janus” and “Kokoro” for the sculpture park of the Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul; at the invitation of the Mori Art Museum of Tokyo, “Kin No Kokoro”, a monumental piece for Roppongi Hills…
At the same time, the artist presents his “Herbier Merveilleux” at the Musée Eugène-Delacroix until the 18th of March 2013, unveiling the secret meaning of flowers; watercolours as well as sculptures resonating with paintings by the nineteenth-century master, in the exhibition “Eugène Delacroix. Des fleurs en hiver. Othoniel, Creten”.
Another solo show will be dedicated to the artist at the Savannah College of Art and Design (USA) from 12 February to 5 May 2013. With the landscape designer Louis Benech, Jean-Michel Othoniel has been chosen to restore the Water Theatre’s Grove in Versailles in 2014. For this occasion, he will create four permanent monumental fountain sculptures at the heart of the gardens of the Palace of Versailles.
In the meantime, the artist will conceive two other artworks in the public space in France: “Le Belvédère de Caluire” on Rives de Saône near Lyon and “Le Coeur de l’Hôtel-Dieu” in the courtyard of l’Hôtel Dieu du Puy-en-Velay

Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin – Paris 3

Galleries — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 14:28:50 +0000

Emmanuel Perrotin’s Gallery represents : Chiho Aoshima, Daniel Arsham, Herman Bas, Sophie Calle, Maurizio Cattelan, Peter Coffin, Johan Creten, Matthew Day Jackson, Wim Delvoye, Elmgreen & Dragset, Lionel Esteve, Daniel Firman, Bernard Frize, Guiseppe Gabellone, Gelitin, Duane Hanson, Jesper Just, Bharti Kher, Kolkoz, Klara Kristalova, Guy Limone, Jin Meyerson, Farhad Moshiri, MR., Takashi Murakami, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Paola Pivi, Claude Rutault, Michael Sailstorfer, Aya Takano, Tatiana Trouve, Piotr Uklanski, Xavier Veilhan, Peter Zimmermann