Alberto Giacometti / Petrit Halilaj @ Institut Giacometti, Paris - Exposition « Nous construisions un fantastique palais la nuit... »

Alberto Giacometti / Petrit Halilaj

« Nous construisions un fantastique palais la nuit... »

Institut Giacometti, Paris

14 mars - 8 juin 2025

L’exposition « Nous construisions un fantastique palais la nuit... », présentée à l’Institut Giacometti, met en dialogue les œuvres et installations originales du plasticien contemporain Petrit Halilaj et un choix d’oeuvres d’Alberto Giacometti. Marqué par son enfance dans un Kosovo en guerre, Petrit Halilaj développe une pratique où les histoires individuelles et collectives se nouent dans des espaces de liberté, non dénués de jeu et de légèreté. Le dessin d’enfant nourrit son travail dans lequel il ouvre un horizon onirique, voire magique, à la sculpture ; un espace onirique qui fait écho à la part de l’enfance souvent discernable dans l’oeuvre de Giacometti. 

Prenant appui sur une pensée de Giacometti à partir de son oeuvre Le Palais à 4h du matin (1932), le titre et les oeuvres de l’exposition explorent la force des constructions fantasmatiques et fragiles que sont les oeuvres des artistes. Dans une installation originale pensée par Petrit Halilaj, l’exposition tisse un réseau subtil de lignes entre les oeuvres de Giacometti. Rêves, espoirs, mais aussi craintes et peurs s’y lient dans des structures fragiles qui emportent et témoignent d’une capacité à communiquer de puissants imaginaires. Face au sentiment d’un monde précaire, les oeuvres d’Halilaj et de Giacometti mobilisent une capacité salvatrice d’invention.

En près d’une trentaine d’oeuvres produites spécifiquement pour l’exposition, Petrit Halilaj explore dans le vocabulaire enfantin de ses « Abetare » une forme de dessin dans l’espace qui est devenu un moyen d’expression propre. L’exposition, nourrie du rapport intense d’Halilaj au dessin d’enfant comme témoignage du monde contemporain, révèle de manière inédite un intérêt et un usage proche chez Alberto Giacometti, déployant les thèmes riches de l’enfance, du rêve, des associations d’idées, du rapport à la merveille.

Un catalogue sous la direction d’Hugo Daniel, richement illustré, en édition bilingue français / anglais, coédité par la Fondation Giacometti, Paris, et FAGE éditions, Lyon, accompagne l’exposition.

PETRIT HALILAJ

Né en 1986 à Kostërrc, Kosovo, Petrit Halilaj vit et travaille entre l’Allemagne, le Kosovo, l’Italie et la France. Il a étudié à l’Académie des beaux-arts de Brera à Milan. Il est actuellement professeur à l’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, en France, avec son partenaire et collaborateur artistique, Álvaro Urbano. Il est membre de l’Akademie der Künste der Welt.

Petrit Halilaj a représenté le Kosovo dans son premier pavillon national à la 55e  Biennale de Venise en 2013. En 2021, la Tate St Ives a présenté son exposition personnelle «Very volcanic over this green feather». En 2024, Petrit Halilaj a ouvert une installation in situ dans le cadre de la commission pour le jardin sur le toit du Met, New York. En 2025, Petrit Halilaj présentera une exposition personnelle au Hamburger Bahnhof, à Berlin. Petrit Halilaj a présenté des expositions individuelles au Musée Tamayo au Mexico, au Musée de la Croix et du Croissant-Rouge, Genève ; au Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, Pays-Bas ; à la Tate St Ives, UK ; au Palacio de Cristal, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid ; au New Museum, New York ; à la Fondazione Merz, Turin, Italie ; au Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA ; au Paul Klee Zentrum, Berne ; au Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, Italie ; au Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Allemagne ; à la Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Allemagne ; à la Fondation d’Entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris ; à la National Gallery of Kosovo, Pristina ; à la Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, Suisse ; à la Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbonne ; et au WIELS, Bruxelles. Son travail a été présenté dans le cadre d’expositions collectives à la 15e Biennale de Lyon ; au Louisiana Museum, Danemark ; au Palais de Tokyo, Paris ; au MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, USA ; au Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection, Venise, Italie ; à NEON, Mykonos, Grèce ; et au Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Allemagne.

Petrit Halilaj a reçu le Kunstpreis Berlin de l’Akademie der Künste en 2023 et a été honoré par la Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (SARF) en 2018. En 2017, il a obtenu le prix Mario Merz ainsi qu’une mention spéciale du jury lors de la 57e Biennale de Venise. Avant cela, il a suivi le programme de bourses MAK-Schindler aux Mackey Apartments (Los Angeles, 2016) et a participé à des résidences à la Villa Romana (Florence, 2014) et à Fürstenberg Contemporary (Heiligenberg, 2012).

Commissaire de l'exposition : Hugo Daniel

INSTITUT GIACOMETTI

5 rue Victor-Schoelcher, 75014 Paris

institut-giacometti.fr

Petrit Halilaj, Lee Bul, Tong Yang-Tze @ Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Artists for The Met's 2024 Contemporary Commissions

Artists for The Met's 2024 Contemporary Commissions

Petrit Halilaj, Lee Bul, and Tong Yang-Tze

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

April 29, 2024 - April 8, 2025

The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents the artists for the 2024 contemporary commissions. Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj (born 1986, Kostërc, former Yugoslavia) will present a site-specific installation for the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden; South Korean artist Lee Bul (born 1964, Yeongju, based in Seoul) has been commissioned to create four sculptures for the niches of The Met’s Fifth Avenue facade; and Taiwanese artist Tong Yang-Tze (born 1942, Shanghai, based in Taipei) will create two monumental works of Chinese calligraphy for The Met’s Great Hall. The commissions will be the first major project in the United States for both Halilaj and Tong. Lee’s commission for the facade marks her first major project in the U.S. in over 20 years. 

The Roof Garden Commission: Petrit Halilaj will be on view from April 29 through October 27, 2024. The Facade Commission: Lee Bul will be on view from September 12, 2024 through May 27, 2025; and The Great Hall Commission: Tong Yang-Tze will be on view from November 21, 2024 through April 8, 2025.

Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer, said, “It is with great excitement that we announce the artists for the 2024 contemporary commissions. All boundary-pushing in their own right, Petrit Halilaj, Lee Bul, and Tong Yang-Tze will light up the three most prominent locations across the Museum, engaging The Met’s global audience. We look forward to unveiling their commissions in the year ahead.”  

For the Roof Garden Commission—the tenth in the series of site-specific commissions for the outdoor space— Petrit Halilaj will transform the roof with a sprawling sculptural installation. The artist’s work is rooted in his biography, deeply connected to the history of the young country of Kosovo (declared an independent nation in 2008)—and his experience living through the war and conflict in the Balkan region in the 1990s as a child refugee. Halilaj uses art as a critical tool to reflect and investigate identity issues, questions of displacement, the interface of personal and global histories, and queer identities.

With a career that spans four decades, Lee Bul is widely recognized as the preeminent artist from South Korea. She is known for her sophisticated use of both highly industrial and labor-intensive materials, such as fabric, metal, plastic, silicone, porcelain, and glass, incorporating artisanal practices as well as technological advancements into her work. Her sculptures, often evoking bodily forms that are at once classical and futuristic, address the aspirations and disillusions that come with progress. For the Facade Commission, Lee will create four sculptures that combine figurative and abstract elements for the Museum’s historic niches. It will be the fifth in a series of contemporary commissions for The Met’s facade that previously featured work by Wangechi Mutu (2019), Carol Bove (2021) and Hew Locke (2022); the current installation by Nairy Baghramian is on view through May 28, 2024. 

Taipei-based Tong Yang-Tze is one of the most celebrated artists working exclusively in Chinese calligraphy today. Best known for making calligraphy in monumental scale, she will create two new works for The Met’s Great Hall. Tong brings Chinese characters into dialogue with three-dimensional space and pushes the conceptual and compositional boundaries of the art form, while remaining dedicated to calligraphy’s raison d’être as the art of writing. Her project will be the third in the series of commissions for The Met’s Great Hall, that previously featured work by Kent Monkman (2019), and is currently the site of Jacolby Satterwhite’s site-specific multimedia installation, A Metta Prayer; on view through January 7, 2024.

About the Artists

Petrit Halilaj is a Kosovar artist born in 1986 who endured the war in the Balkan region during the 1990s. After a formative period in Italy, where he studied art at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, he moved to Berlin in 2008, where he still lives and has his studio. His projects encompass a variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, poetry, and performance. Often incorporating material histories from his native land and manifesting as ambitious spatial installations, his work distills personal relationships, memories, and experiences into sculptural propositions.

Halilaj’s work has steadily gained international recognition over the past few years, with important exhibitions held at TBA21-Academy’s Ocean Space, Venice (2023); Tate St Ives (2021); Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2020); Paul Klee Zentrum, Berna (2018); Fondazione Merz, Turin (2018), New Museum, New York (2017); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2015); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2015); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2015). In 2013, he represented his country in the first Kosovo Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2022, he participated in Manifesta 14 held in Pristina, Kosovo. In November 2023, a retrospective of his work opened at the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. 

Lee Bul is a formidable leading sculptor of her generation who works across a diverse range of media—from drawing, sculpture, and painting to performance, installation, and video—to examine themes of beauty, desire, corruption, and decay. The Met Facade Commission will be Lee’s first major project in the United States since her solo exhibition at the New Museum in New York in 2002. Lee represented her country in the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999 and received the prestigious Ho-Am Prize in South Korea in 2019.

Since her breakthrough performance in the late 1980s in Seoul and Tokyo wearing sewn sculptural forms, Lee has been heralded as a pioneer in contemporary sculpture and installation. She is most known for her sculptural figures and landscapes that blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial and are sensuous yet fragmented, forthcoming yet enigmatic. These dramatic constructions critique progress-driven, perfection-obsessed values through transformations of familiar forms. Structurally and visually complex, Lee’s work also explores the aspirations and failures of utopian visions and exposes a sense of vulnerability and melancholy in history. 

Having practiced calligraphy since her youth, Tong Yang-Tze was trained in oil painting in Taiwan (BFA, National Normal University, Taipei, 1966) and the United States (MFA, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1970). After a brief stint in graphic design in New York City, she came to prominence in 1980s Taiwan with calligraphy, despite its waning influence in contemporary art. Writing well-known phrases selected from classical Chinese texts and enlarging the characters are her key strategies to connect to the audience. Tong’s calligraphy takes inspiration from the styles of masters in pre-modern China and the scale and compositions of mid-20th-century Western abstract paintings. Her commitment to the written characters is rooted in her belief in its centrality in Chinese cultural identity and calligraphy’s capacity for visual, emotional, and social impact beyond linguistic barriers. Working on the floor, she manipulates the movement and tension in the brushstrokes, the foremost quality in calligraphy. The oversized characters pose physical, formal, and conceptual challenges, while they offer new compositional possibilities and viewing experience. She received the National Cultural Award in 2011, the highest honor of its kind in Taiwan.

These projects are the latest in The Met’s series of contemporary commissions in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist's practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met's audiences.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

www.metmuseum.org

Flowers in Art @ ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishoj

FLOWERS IN ART 

ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj

Through 9 January 2022

A major exhibition at ARKEN tells the story of humankind’s fascination with the world of flowers. It examines how flowers in art reflect changing worldviews, outlooks on nature and social conditions – from the sensuous flower paintings of the nineteenth century to the eco-critical currents of contemporary art.

Marc Quinn 

Bhasat Wilap at Assi Ghat, 2010 

ARKEN Museum of Modern Art 

Photo: Anders Sune Berg

Andy Warhol  

Flowers, 1970 

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk 

Photo: Poul Buchard / Brøndum & Co.

J.L. Jensen  

Still Life with Flowers in an Antique Vase on a Marble Tabletop, 1834 Thorvaldsens Museum 

Photo: Thorvaldsens Museum

Flowers: we decorate our homes with them, use them as messengers to convey our innermost feelings and find healing in their scents and vitality. Flowers have always fascinated us and found their way into art. The exhibition Flowers in Art at ARKEN examines the many and varied relationships between flower and humankind expressed in art, as represented here by works by fifty-two international and Danish artists.

Says curator Dea Antonsen: ‘Flowers have been a central motif throughout art history, but in these climate-critical times the flower motif takes on new and poignant relevance as we have to rethink our relationship with nature. The exhibition brings together iconic, historical works and cutting-edge contemporary art, prompting new perspectives to emerge on how we humans “consume” flowers, stage ourselves by means of flowers and shape the world through our relationships with flowers’.

Tony Matelli

Arrangement, 2013

Courtesy the artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Paris

Petrit Halilaj & Alvaro Urbano

7th of April 2020 (Quince), 2020

Courtesy the artists, ChertLüdde, kamel mennour and Travesia Cuatro

Kapwani Kiwanga  

The Marias, 2020 

Courtesy Centre d’art contemporaine d’Ivry – le Crédac, 

the artist and Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin. 

Photo: Marc Domage

As a motif in art, the flower has had several heydays. One of these was the nineteenth century’s soulful depictions of the beauty and vitality of flowers, which were part of an overall quest to understand the essence of nature and how the world worked. Flower motifs appear in new ways in art today, a time when scientists issue dire warnings about biodiversity crises and young people take to the streets for the sake of the climate. The romantic notion of unspoiled nature has been lost, and contemporary artists rethink the relationship between flower and humankind in works full of finely attuned sensibilities, humour and critique.

Alhed Larsen

Rhododendron, n.d. 

The Johannes Larsen Museum 

Photo: Jens Frederiksen

Hilma af Klint

On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees, 1922

The Hilma af Klint Foundation

Photo: Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden

Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg

The Clearing (Yellow, Purple and Rosehip Flower), 2015 (detail)

Courtesy the artists and Lisson Gallery

Photo: Jack Hems

The exhibition is in itself a diverse bouquet of sensory experiences, presenting many and varied works that depict flowers in such diverse media as painting, sculpture, photography, film and installation art. Bringing together illustrious artists of the past such as Odilon Redon, Claude Monet, J.L. Jensen and Hilma af Klint with modern and contemporary artists that include Marc Quinn, Andy Warhol, Melanie Bonajo, Tony Matelli and Petrit Halilaj & Alvaro Urbano, Kapwani Kiwanga, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, the exhibition forges new connections between the historical roots of the flower motif and the critical agendas of contemporary art.

The exhibition is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue in Danish and English with contributions from, among others, Danish curator Dea Antonsen, American historian of science Lorraine Daston, Polish philosopher Monika Bakke, Danish art historian Rasmus Kjærboe and Austrian literary scholar Isabel Kranz.

ARKEN MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Skovvej 100, 2635 Ishøj

www.arken.dk