Philippe Parreno

Philippe Parreno (b. 1964) lives and works in Paris.

Philippe Parreno creates artworks that question the boundaries between reality and fiction, exploring the nebulous realm in which the real and the imagined blur and combine. Working in a diverse range of media including sculpture, drawing, film, and performance the internationally acclaimed French artist seeks to expand our understanding of duration, inviting us to radically re-evaluate the nature of reality, memory, and the passage of time. Central to Parreno’s practice is his quest for an ultimate form of communication capable of transcending language.  

Taking the exhibition as a medium, Parreno has radically redefined the exhibition experience by exploring its possibilities as a coherent ‘object’ rather than as a collection of individual works. To this end, he conceives his shows as a scripted space where a series of events unfolds. The visitor is guided through the galleries by the orchestration of sound and image, which heightens their sensory experience. This is a question of creating, in a given volume, as much space and time as possible by folding and unfolding the space onto itself. 

Previous meditations on the nature of reality include No Ghost Just a Shell (1999) a collaborative project with Pierre Huyghe in which the Japanese Manga character Ann Lee was liberated from the binds of intellectual copyright in a deliberate blurring of reality and fiction; and Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) a full-length feature film the artist co-directed with Douglas Gordon. Focusing on the French footballer Zinedine Zidane, this extraordinary real-time portrait spans the duration of a football match during which seventeen 35mm cameras followed the footballer’s every move. 

For the inaugural exhibition at Pilar Corrias, London, Parreno created a large-scale, cast-aluminium sculpture of a generic snow-covered Christmas tree. Entitled Fraught Times: For Eleven Months of the Year it’s an Artwork and in December it’s Christmas (October) (2008), the work operated as both a decorative object and a time marker inviting us to expand our comprehension of time in a process of metaphorical game-playing. The sculpture was shown alongside a pane of glass on which condensation was etched. The ghostly breath hovered at the exact height of the mouth of the famous Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca killed by the Franco Regime in 1936. A Recital of True Events, Parreno’s fifth solo exhibition at Pilar Corrias, will open in June 2023.  

Parreno is a French artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Paris. He graduated from Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Grenoble in 1988 and in 1989 from Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In 2016 Parreno presented the Hyundai Commission in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London. He was the first artist to take over the entire 22,000 square metre gallery space at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris with his exhibition Anywhere, Anywhere Out of the World which opened in October 2013.

Major exhibitions of Parreno’s work include:

Pola Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan (2024); Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2024); Pilar Corrias, London (2023); Espace Louis Vuitton, Munich (2023); La Bourse de Commerce, Paris (2022); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2021); Museo del Prado, Madrid (2021) Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia, Venice (2019);  Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018); Art Institute Chicago (2018); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2017); ACMI (2016); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2015), Park Avenue Armory, New York (2015); Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2017); Fundaciao de Serralves, Porto (2017); Thenabo York (2015), TV Channel, CAC Malaga (2014), The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow (2013); Barbican Art Gallery, London (2013); Fondation Beyeler (2012); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2012); The Serpentine Gallery, London (2010); Witte de With (2010); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2009); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2009); Kunsthalle Zurich (2009); CCA Kitakyoshu, Japan (2006); Kunsthalle Zürich (2006); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2003); Musée D’Art Moderne de le Ville de Paris (2002), and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2001). 

Parreno’s work is represented in the public collections of: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kanazawa Museum of the 21st Century, Japan; Musée D’Art Moderne de le Ville de Paris; Musée du Luxembourg, Luxembourg; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; LACMA, Los Angeles; MoMA, New York; MUSAC, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis.