Jean-Michel Othoniel

Jean-Michel Othoniel is a contemporary artist born in 1964 in Saint-Etienne (France). He lives and works in Paris.

An artist who has a passion for all sorts of metamorphoses, sublimations and transmutations, Jean-Michel Othoniel has a predilection for materials with reversible properties. Othoniel first gained recognition with a series of sculptures made of sulfur, exhibited at Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992.

In 1993, Jean-Michel Othoniel introduced glass into his work and began to explore its properties. Transformations, mutations of materials, and rites of passage from one state to another echo an essential rite in the artist’s work: that of journeys and memory.

In 1994, he participated in the exhibition Féminin/Masculin at the Pompidou Center in Paris, with an installation entitled My Beautiful Closet, a mise-en-scène of dancers filmed in the darkness of a closet.

In 1996, Othoniel hung gigantic necklaces in the bamboo gardens of the Villa Medici in Rome, and later in the trees of the Venetian garden of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (1997), and at the Alhambra and Generalife, in Granada (1999). Similar to a forbidden fruit, the necklace has a life in and of itself: it merges into the landscape and the leaves, like organic outgrowths absorbing shadows and diffracting light. The notion of wound or injury is at the heart of his work. In 1997, Othoniel created Collier Cicatrice, a small necklace made of red glass that the artist offers to whoever wants to wear it with pride.

In 2000, a century after Hector Guimard, Jean-Michel Othoniel transformed the Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre into the Kiosque des Noctambules: two crowns made of glass and aluminum conceal a bench designed for chance encounters in the sleepy city. In 2003, Jean-Michel Othoniel conceived Crystal Palace for the Cartier Foundation in Paris and for MOCA in Miami. For Crystal Palace, he asked glassblowers in Venice and at Marseille’s CIRVA to create forms that would ultimately become enigmatic sculptures standing between jewelry, architecture and erotic objects.

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