Pierre Huyghe (born 1962) is an acclaimed French artist who works in a variety of media, from film and video to public interventions. He trained at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, and started his artistic career with the painters group Les Frères Ripoulin along with other French artists Nina Childress and Claude Closky.
Much of Huyghe's work examines the structural properties of film and its problematic relationship to reality. His two-channel video The Third Memory (1999), for example, takes as its starting point Sidney Lumet's 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino in the role of the gay bank robber John Wojtowicz. Huyghe's video reconstructs the set of Lumet's film, but he allows Wojtowicz himself--now a few dozen years older and out of jail--to tell the story of the robbery. Huyghe juxtaposes images from the reconstruction with footage from Dog Day Afternoon, demonstrating that Wojtowicz's memory has been irrevocably altered by the film about his life.
In 2001 Huyghe represented France at the Venice Biennale. His pavilion, entitled Le Château de Turing, won a special prize from the jury. In 2002 Huyghe won the Hugo Boss Prize from the Guggenheim Museum, exhibiting several works there the following year. In 2006, Huyghe's film "A Journey That Wasn't" was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in New York, and at the re-opening of ARC/MAM and The Tate Modern.
He is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery.
His last name is pronounced similar to "wheeg," with the "wh" as in the old-fashioned or Irish pronunciation of the English word "what".
References
Fabian Stech, J'ai parlé avec, Lavier , Annette Messager, Sylvie Fleury, Hirschhorn, Pierre Huyghe, Delvoye, Le Consortium, D.G.-F., Hou Hanru, Sophie Calle, Ming, Sans et Bourriaud. Presses du réel. Dijon 2006.
Search Term: "Pierre_Huyghe"
Categories: 1962 births | Living people | French artists | Contemporary artists
