Pierre Huyghe’s installations, videos, happenings, and sculptural objects integrate loosely structured events with room for spontaneous intervention, seeking to “reinvent rituals of social engagement.” His ethereal works blur fact and fiction to consider the ways in which reality can be molded through a seemingly controlled scenario. Ominous overtones attach themselves quickly to his works, be it an ecosystem of arrow crabs that eat their kin in Zoodram 5 or a monkey trained to work in a restaurant while wearing a photorealistic mask of a young girl in Untitled (Human Mask). Huyghe employs an anthropological outlook, seeking to understand the atmosphere of controlled environments that may mutate by way of the elements involved. His video works consider expectations of the museum space and the unrealistic demands of an aesthetic utopia. Channeling spectacle and seeking to uncover the impact it has on contemporary values, Huyghe uses his art practice to reveal the metabolic potential of art making.

Huyghe has exhibited and performed at a number of international institutions including Centre Pompidou, Paris, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Tate Modern, London, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Guggenheim Museum, New York, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Stededlijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, MoMA PS 1, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among many others. He has participated in international art shows such as the Istanbul Biennial in 1999, and dOCUMENTA XI and XIII in 2002 and 2012 respectively, to name a few. In 2001, Huyghe represented France in the Venice Biennale. The artist has also been honored by awards including the Hugo Boss Prize in 2002, the Smithsonian American Museum’s Contemporary Artist Award in 2010, and the Roswitha Haftmann Preis Award in 2013.