Cyprien Gaillard - Wolkengarten

The Espace Louis Vuitton München is proud to present Wolkengarten, a new exhibition dedicated to French artist Cyprien Gaillard. The works belong to the Collection and are presented within the framework of the Fondation Louis Vuitton “Hors-les-murs” programme.

Cyprien Gaillard was born in Paris (France) in 1980. In the form of sculptures, videos, engravings, photographs and large-scale urban interventions, Gaillard’s expanding body of work, which is inspired by architecture and places that reveal the complex histories of the 20th-century utopias, manifests an omnipresent feeling of temporal collision. The artist is particularly fond of writer Vladimir Nabokov’s maxim: “The future is but the obsolete in reverse.” Through the documentation of publicly staged spectacles such as light shows and demolitions, he showcases disconcerting situations in which mystery, menace and repressed memory are explicitly asserted.

Gaillard also refers to a certain “Hubert Robert Smithson” as one of his references; the amalgamation of Hubert Robert, an 18th-century French landscape painter, and Robert Smithson, a leading figure in land art. From the former, a contemporary of French philosopher Denis Diderot, Gaillard draws an interest in ruination and the picturesque; from the latter, he adopts a fascination with entropy, earthwork and science fiction.

The Collection has brought together a significant number of works spanning from 2004 to 2019 by Gaillard, one of the most noteworthy artists of his generation. For the presentation here at Espace Louis Vuitton München, the artist himself selected two video pieces, screening for the first time in a display specifically re-invented: Real Remnants of Fictive Wars V (2004) and Desniansky Raion (2007). In Real Remnants of Fictive Wars V, Gaillard adds a contemporary twist to both land art and landscape painting by filming a fire extinguisher being set off in a bucolic scene. He also draws parallels between the great battle paintings of the Renaissance and hooligan riots with Desniansky Raion. Bearing witness to the beauty exuding from the apparent violence of his typical visual telescoping, Gaillard’s production opens up new perspectives on our shared environment.