Performance
Pierre Joseph
Arlequin (Personnage à réactiver)
26 Jun 2021
The event is over
Inspired by the society of communication, film, role play and virtual reality, in the early 1990s artist Pierre Joseph developed a series of "Characters to reactivate": a sleeping Snow White, a pale surfer, a fairy-tale witch, a paintballer invading the National Museum of Modern Art, racing driver Ayrton Senna lying on the ground, the dead bullfighter echoing Manet's famous painting…
Here we find his Harlequin, a performance acquired by the Centre Pompidou in 2014: melancholic and impassive, from the Commedia dell'arte, it is the contemporary avatar of a long line of harlequins represented in the history of painting, from Watteau to Picasso.
Pierre Joseph, born in Caen in 1965, living in Paris, has produced extremely contemporary artistic work for several years around questions of knowledge and its transmission, the production of forms, language and modes of thought, profoundly marking the practice of his generation of artists. With his "Characters to reactivate", created as early as 1991, or later with his experiments in virtual reality, Pierre Joseph envisages art as a "zone of the possible" and explores, in the words of art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, new, playful and productive "possibilities of life" where objects, images and human beings cohabit.
When
3pm - 6pm
Where
Pierre Joseph
© Adagp, Paris, photo © Philippe Migeat, Centre Pompidou, Mnam-Cci