Exhibitions
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Exhibitions

Artist’s career since 1986

My Way

September - November 2011, Samsung Life Insurance Building, Seoul, Korea

L’Herbier merveilleux

June - December 2011, Château royal de Provence, Tarascon, France

Paris-Delhi-Bombay...

May - September 2011, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

My Way

September - November 2011, Samsung Life Insurance Building, Seoul, Korea

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My Way

Personal Exhibition
Samsung Life Insurance Building, Seoul, Korea
9/8/11 - 11/27/11
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PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art is pleased to present « My Way », a retrospective of Jean-Michel Othoniel from September 8 to November 11, 2011. This world tour exhibition was first presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in March and travelled to the Hara Museum in Tokyo and the Brooklyn Museum in New York in the summer of 2012 after the current exhibition at PLATEAU in Seoul. 


Jean-Michel Othoniel has consciously distanced himself from the contemporary art trends over the past 25 years, instead pursuing a unique sculptural universe inspired by his personal life. His acute sensibility for loss and extinction has unraveled in his works through diverse transformative mediums, expressing the beauty and repulsion of the body. The artist has created a magical world sublimating tragedy into beauty and harmony, guiding the viewers into his own fantastic universe longed by our contemporary society.


As the title of the exhibition « My Way » indicates, this exhibition hopes to provide an opportunity to present Othoniel’s unique artistic path over the past 25 years, sublimating the mourning of loss into beauty in his own way. Moreover, the exhibition also includes a photo-archive documenting the artist’s prolific travels and personal encounters, which form the basis of his artistic inspiration, as well as a participatory installation, entitled The Wishing Wall that will allow more intimate connection between the visitors and the artist.

L’Herbier merveilleux

June - December 2011, Château royal de Provence, Tarascon, France

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L’Herbier merveilleux

Personal Exhibition
Château royal de Provence, Tarascon, France
6/15/11 - 12/31/11
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Othoniel reveals a series of notes on the symbolism of flowers, texts and quotations collected during his readings, along with some of his watercolors and photographs. With this exhibition, and the book of the same name he made, he shows the discreet presence of flowers in the History of art and gives us the keys to their secret language.


Othoniel's herbarium offers us the opportunity to marvel on simple flowers, to discover their true meaning. Both the book and the exhibition shed light on the sensual forms of his sculptures, often finding inspiration in the complex shapes of flowers.

Paris-Delhi-Bombay...

May - September 2011, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

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Paris-Delhi-Bombay...

Collective Exhibition
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
5/25/11 - 9/19/11
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The Centre Pompidou presents in Gallery 1 « Paris-Delhi-Bombay … », a major exhibition that invites the visitors to discover contemporary Indian society through the viewpoints of Indian and French visual artists. Based on an unprecedented collaboration between India and France, this event aims to generate discussions and build lasting relationships between the two cultures. As a unique confrontation of artistic expression, this project of a new genre thrives experiences and creative visions: how is India perceived today by Indian artists and french artists? 


Nearly fifty artists reflect the profound changes in Indian society through their perception of the policy (the foundations of democracy, the question of partition, rising middle class), religion (beliefs, spirituality ...), the identity (national, regional, linguistic, sexual, related to caste ...), urban (rural-urban migration, growth of megacities), crafts (traditions and modernity, cultural heritage and current technologies) or home (family, marriage, women's emancipation, kitchen ...). Indian and French artists bring light on India today and deliver their own interpretation its society.


Most French guest artists in the exhibition traveled for the first time in India during this project. More than two thirds of the works are productions specifically made in this specific context, and hence present a stimulating and unexpected dialogue. Besides the abundance and excitement of its art scene, India is the largest democracy in the world, a new economic player in the front row and the second most populous country in the world.


In this regard, it arouses great interest, often passions and growing attention from the French and European public, but it is still distant and unknown. The ambition of « Paris Delhi Bombay … » is to bring together the two cultures through their art scenes, to reconcile and to raise awareness of this young growing society and its vibrant contemporary art scene.

Othoniel, My Way Paris

March - May 2011, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

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Othoniel, My Way Paris

Personal Exhibition
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
3/2/11 - 5/23/11
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From March the 2nd to May the 23rd of 2011, the Centre Pompidou is the first major cultural institution to devote an exhibition to jean-Michel Othoniel, tracing his career from 1987 to today. In complicity with the artist, the Centre Pompidou offers a retrospective of his work entitled "My Way".


Composed of eighty works that have never been seen together, the visitor discover Othoniel’s first confidential works, intimate and poetic along the monumental works of the artist, whose spectacular dimensions and the wonder they bring strike the imagination. This journey is marked by various stages of research and experimentations: until the mid-1990s, the artist seizes flimsy materials, sensitive, such as sulfur, phosphorus and wax, between beauty and repulsion. These original materials, not often used in sculpture, were the occasion for him to build a reflection on the body, the suffering and the loss. The artist explores the boundary between the organic world and the natural world and questions the limits of the genre.


Then, with the discovery of glass, its color and its infinite artistic possibilities combining strength and vulnerability, Jean-Michel Othoniel’s work addresses a more sculptural reflection, finding a new monumentality. All unfolds in two exhibition spaces in the National Museum of Modern Art, the Gallery of the Museum and Art Gallery graphic, specially gathered for the occasion. Meanwhile, the Children's Gallery hosts two monumental works of the artist in a proposal entitled Le Réel Merveilleux.

Le Réel merveilleux

February - August 2011, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

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Le Réel merveilleux

Personal Exhibition
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
2/13/11 - 8/22/11
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This exhibition-workshop provides an opportunity for children, from 6 years old, to raise awareness on the artistic process and the world of Jean-Michel Othoniel, around themes that are dear to him: travel, souvenir and wonder. Through this prism, the Gallery allows children to explore two iconic works by the artist: Le Petit Theatre de Peau d'Ane, 2004, and The Precious Stonewall, 2010. As all the glass sculptures created by Jean-Michel Othoniel, they are all precious and fragile, rich in symbols, sources of stories and legends, and work as windows opening a marvelous world.


Four devices allow to approach the creative process of the artist. Ranging from the genesis of ideas with watercolors to the work of glass, playing with transparency and light, to his writing activity. Children can also discover the Augmented Reality Game, created by the artist in 2010, which is a 3D travel in Othoniel’s world focusing on six of his works.


The activities proposed are based on Othoniel’s works and his approach on his own practice. Following an observation phase, children explore the richness of the theme and then express their own imagination. The tackled issues are memory, role play, the marvelous and the monstrous, writing and narrative, which are very present in the artist’s work, but also the transformation of matter, games on transparency and opacity, repulsion and attraction…

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