b. 1962, Paris

Pierre Huyghe was born in 1962 in Paris. He attended the École Supérieure d’Arts Graphiques from 1981 to 1982 and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs from 1982 to 1985. Throughout his career, he has been involved in multimedia collaborations with other artists. He orchestrated Mobile TV (1995), a television station showing programs by various artists, for the Institut d’Art Contemporain in Villeurbanne, France, in 1995 and for Centre d’Art Le Consortium in Dijon in 1997. In 1996 he worked with Philippe Parreno on L’Histoire d’un sentiment, a deliberately unfinished film script that included a character named Anna Sanders. In 1997 they developed Anna Sanders, a single issue of a faux magazine for a woman who is never shown and thus becomes a sort of phantom demographic. In 1999 they devised No Ghost Just a Shell, in which Annlee, a Japanese manga cartoon character, was bought and licensed by the artists, “shared” with other artists (who did their own projects based upon her), and then ultimately given the rights to herself. In the late 1990s, Huyghe was an innovator of the “post-production” technique, reusing existing mass media, such as films, to create new art. In the triple-screen projection L’Ellipse (1998), he slowed a jump cut from Wim Wenders’s 1977 film The American Friend and expanded it by adding his own footage of the film’s leading man, Bruno Ganz, now older, acting out a scene that the film itself skips—a walk across a city, from one apartment to another, between important phone calls. This “extra” scene brings our attention to the temporal gaps in fiction films that our own imaginations fill in and to the viewer’s role in completing the work of narrative art. In The Third Memory (2000), the artist recruited John Wojtowicz, the man depicted by Al Pacino in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975), to reenact scenes from the film, mixing real and filmic memory. Streamside Day Follies (2003), at Dia Center for the Arts in New York, consisted of walls that moved in concert to form a freestanding screening room in which a video was then projected; the video captured the construction of a suburban housing development in Fishkill, New York, and a surreal opening-day party hosted by Huyghe upon its completion. In the film This is Not a Time For Dreaming (2004), vegetation spontaneously sprouts from a model of Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center at Harvard University and a puppet show enacts the misadventures that unfolded prior to breaking ground on the building. For the 2008 Sydney Biennale, Huyghe transformed the interior of the Sydney Opera House into a veritable forest.

Huyghe has had solo exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998 and 2006), Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal (1999), Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2000), Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2000), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (2001), Institute of Visual Culture in Cambridge, United Kingdom (2002), Castello di Rivoli in Italy (2004), Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (2005), and Tate Modern in London (2006). He has also exhibited widely in group shows, such as the Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (1995), Venice Biennale (1997, 2003, and 2007), Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg (1998), Biennale of Sydney (1998 and 2008), Istanbul Biennial (1999 and 2001), Documenta 11 (2002), Moving Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2002 and 2003), Performa 05 in New York (2005), and Whitney Biennial (2006). In 2001 he represented France at the Venice Biennale. He was a DAAD artist-in-residence in Berlin in 2000 and was awarded the Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize in 2002. In 2005 he was awarded the Best French Artist Prize from Beaux-Arts Magazine. He lives and works in Paris.