BOOK:Jean Michel Othoniel,Phaidon Publications

Jean-Michel Othoniel is an artist who creates sculptures that explore themes of fragility, transformation, and ephemerality. Using the repetition of such modular elements as bricks or beads, his work deploys various strategies that hint at loss and despair – cracks in his objects’ perfect surfaces, negative spaces and, early in his career, transient materials such as sulfur. The most authoritative study of the artist’s work to date, it includes intimate gallery pieces as well as monumental public commissions around the world. He started out, at the beginning of the 1990s, with works made out of wax or sulfur, showing them at the Kassel documenta in 1992. A turning point in his career came following year when he began employing glass exploring the properties of a material that subsequently became a hallmark of his work. In “Icebergs” (2019), a series of stainless-steel reliefs that outline an imaginary and shifting cartography on the walls. “There is a strong oracular aspect to my work. There is something intuitive in my works, but also of the order of revelation. Artists have a powerful intuition” he says, as he evokes his series of “Oracles” (2019), linear modules of amber, yellow and grey bricks.-Dimitris Lempesis