Philippe Parreno - Marilyn

The Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing is pleased to present Marilyn, an exhibition dedicated to French artist Philippe Parreno. This is the fourth exhibition in China produced in the framework of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Hors-les-murs” programme, which showcases previously unseen holdings of the Collection at the Espaces Culturels Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, München, Venezia and Beijing, thus carrying out the Fondation’s intent to mount international projects and make them accessible to a broader public.

Philippe Parreno’s reputation has been built on the diversity of his practice which spans a vast range of media including film, sculpture, drawing and performance. Through his multidisciplinary practice, Parreno has created unexpected artworks that question the boundaries between reality and fiction, often blurring the distinction between the two. The artist invites the viewer to radically re-evaluate the nature of reality, memory, and the passage of time, elaborating universes where the aesthetics of social exchanges and situations are prioritized over the creation of art objects.

Since the 1990s, one constant and underlying thread in Parreno’s oeuvre is his interest in the exhibition as a medium, placing its construction at the heart of his process. He vies that the exhibition is an object in its own right, an experience and format which he is constantly questioning and reinventing. Thus preferring projects to objects, Parreno began examining unique approaches to narration and representation throughout his works, conceiving his exhibitions as a scripted space where a series of events unfold. He seeks to transform the exhibition visit into a singular experience that plays with spatial and temporal boundaries and the sensory experience of the visitor. From the 2000s onwards, ghosts, ventriloquists and robots began appearing more in Parreno’s films, posing the question of the origins of storytelling, whilst interrogating the passage of time and blurring reality and fiction. These important themes continue through Parreno’s later works, including Marilyn (2012), a film recreating Marilyn Monroe’s life in a phantasmagorical séance. For Parreno, the exhibition is a total work of art that offers an ongoing interdependent series of open possibilities.

This brand new show invites you to experience emblematic works from the Collection by Philippe Parreno in various media including, alongside the eponymous video installation Marilyn: In Preparation of Marilyn: “The Quasi Living” (2013), Untitled (2010), and Untitled (2012). Comprising of drawings, sculpture and film, these works typify Parreno’s multidisciplinary practice through which he continues his quest to find an ultimate form of communication capable of transcending language.