Jean-Michel Othoniel - Invisibility Faces Necklace 8 for Sale

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Jean-Michel Othoniel

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Invisibility Faces Necklace 8

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About The Work

These mysterious meteorite-like obsidian sculptures are made of volcanic black glass stones brought back from Armenia. Othoniel arrived at the title for his obsidian series, Invisibility Faces, after reading [Georges] Didi-Huberman’s book The Cube and the Face: Around a Sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, (2015). His obsidians were already made, but in Didi-Huberman’s descriptions of Giacometti’s uncanny, crystal-like form Othoniel recognized the character of a semiliving thing. Like Cube [by Giacometti], each of Othoniel’s obsidians is a thing and an image, a body and a stone, an abstraction and a man: an imponderable concatenation of heterogeneous meaning.

This series of necklaces are derived from his sculptural "busts"; natural stones displayed upon wood plinths. These obsidian busts, despite their titles, invite viewers to look at themselves in their shiny surfaces in a sort of mirroring or self-reckoning with our own human condition.

Each necklace is unique, shaped by the natural facets created by its formation and history.

Courtesy of Perrotin

About Jean-Michel Othoniel

Born in 1964 in Saint-Etienne, France, Jean-Michel Othoniel has been inventing a universe with multiple contours since the late 1980s.

1993 marked a turning point in his work when he began using glass. Collaborating with the finest artisan glassblowers in Murano, he explored the properties of a material that has since become his hallmark to poeticize and re-enchant the world. More recently, his work has taken on an architectural dimension, engaging with gardens or historical sites through public or private commissions around the world.

Jean-Michel Othoniel had major exhibitions all over the world since his participation to the Documentain Kassel in 1992. He had an important retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris entitled “My Way” then shown at the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art/Plateau in Seoul, then in 2012 at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Macao Museum of Art in Macao and the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

He exhibited in museum and garden at Petit Palais in Paris in 2021, at the Seoul Museum of Art in 2022, at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 2023 and at the Sara Hilden Museum in Finland in 2024.

Since his first public commission in Paris in 2000, Le Kiosque des Noctambules, his work has been shown equally in museums and in the public space including an exceptional project of three fountain sculptures in gilded glass in the gardens at the Château de Versailles, Les Belles Danses, but also Alfa, an installation for the new National Museum of Qatar of 114 fountain sculptures. In 2019 a new series of paintings entered the permanent collection of the Musée du Louvre. In 2023, he created his first bridge in a magnificent garden close by Paris as well as an impressive fountain in the South of France.

His works can be found in the world’s best contemporary art museums, foundations and private collections.

Othoniel just opened a new solo show at the Museo Oscar Niemeyer, Brazil and is working on 3 new solo shows for 2025, at the Long Museum Shanghai in April and at La Malmaison museum in Cannes, France in May. He is also preparing his biggest exhibition ever for the city of Avignon, France in June 2025 where he will take over 10 museums with more than 200 works.

Othoniel is represented by Perrotin, Kukje, and Simoes de Assis.

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