Major Philippe Parreno Exhibit to Open in June at Armory

For his largest exhibition in the U.S. to date, Philippe Parreno constructs a multi-sensory journey within the monumental interior of Park Avenue Armory's Wade Thompson Drill Hall-guiding and manipulating the audience's experience through the spectral presence of sound and light. H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS transforms the traditional exhibition experience into a scripted series of rotating events, incorporating new and re-mastered films and objects with live performances by pianist Mikhail Rudy and recorded sound that respond to the Armory's expansive 55,000-square-foot space. Choreographed together, these works form an all encompassing and perpetually evolving artistic composition of operatic proportions.

On view at the Armory from June 9 through August 2, 2015, H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS (pronounced hypnosis) is commissioned by Park Avenue Armory and co-curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Alex Poots, with consulting curator Tom Eccles. In addition to live music, the exhibition features recorded sound by Nicholas Becker and set design by Randall Peacock.

"The Armory enables contemporary artists across genres to achieve their most ambitious visions, unconstrained by traditional settings. Philippe's work in particular demands and thrives on this sort of creative freedom. His work radically redefines the exhibition ritual, transforming it from a series of individual works and experiences into a single unified event that interacts with and responds to our soaring drill hall," said Rebecca Robertson, President and Executive Producer of Park Avenue Armory. "Each day and indeed each moment of the installation will be different, revealing new connections among the objects, films, music, and architecture that constitute Philippe's vision."

For the installation, the Armory's darkened drill hall will be animated by a series of 26 marquee light sculptures by Parreno, six of which are being made especially for this exhibition, recalling old-fashioned illuminated theater canopies and billboards. At once works of sculpture, architecture, and art, the marquees are a central and defining element of H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS and will be arranged in two rows within the drill hall to form an avenue that will help guide the visitor experience. Other highlighted works include:

• The Crowd (2015), a new film shot within the Armory's drill hall space;
• The film Anywhere out of the world (2000) presenting a Japanese Manga character Annlee, as well as AnnLee (2011), a series of constructed situations performed by Annlee incarnate as a young woman, created by Tino Sehgal and produced by Asad Raza;
• Marilyn (2012), a phantasmagoric séance of the deceased starlit in a suite she once occupied at the Waldorf Astoria; and
• Invisibleboy (2010), a portrait of an illegal Chinese immigrant boy and the spectral monsters that inhabit a child's imagination, scratched directly onto the film stock.

Animated by a cumulative soundtrack of recorded sound and live performances by Mikhail Rudy of Ligeti, Liszt, Ravel, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner among others, these works together with others create a choreographed experience exploring themes of apparitions, memory, and absence.

"Philippe is one of the very rare artistic innovators," said Armory Artistic Director and exhibition co-curator Alex Poots. "This new exhibition will bring to life and engage with the Armory's monumental and storied drill hall space. Through the movement of his artworks, the use of light and dark, live and recorded music, and sound, film, and memory, Philippe is creating an total art work full of metaphor, counterpoints, coincidences, and interaction."

Added co-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, "In Philippe's hands, the exhibition itself becomes the work of art, a narrative and confluence of events that fold and unfold in the space. The architecture and the visitors come together as vital elements of this choreographed Gesamtkunstwerk."

Philippe Parreno is a visual artist whose work spans a diversity of media, including film, sculpture, performance, drawing, and text. Based in Paris, France, Parreno has collaborated with a wide spectrum of artists and curators throughout his career and has exhibited internationally.

In presenting his work, Parreno approaches the exhibition as a medium unto itself, and explores its possibilities as a coherent "object" rather than as a collection of individual works. To this end, he conceives his shows as a scripted space where a series of events unfold. Parreno used this format for Anywhere, Anywhere Out of the World (2013), where he transformed the Palais de Tokyo in Paris using objects, music, lights, and films to guide the visitor's experience, and at the Barbican, London, in The Bride and The Bachelors (2013), where his orchestration of live and pre-recorded sound activated the artworks of Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp in concert with live dance performances.

Collaboration is integral to Parreno's work. In 2006, Parreno co-directed with artist Douglas Gordon the documentary Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, which follows the legendary French midfielder throughout an entire Real Madrid vs Villarreal match using 17 cameras. In 2012, Parreno collaborated with artist Liam Gillick on To the Moon via the Beach, which filled the Amphitheatre in Arles with sand. Over four days, the "beach" was transformed by sand sculptors into a moonscape, which formed a constantly changing backdrop to a series of artists' projects. Most recently, Parreno was involved in a unique collaboration with a range of artists and curators-including Tino Sehgal, Liam Gillick, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Asad Raza, and Pierre Boulez-for the exhibition Solaris Chronicles at the LUMA Arles Campus, which examined the creative vision of architect Frank Gehry.

Parreno's work is represented in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kanazawa Museum of the 21st Century, Japan; MoMA New York; Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. His work has also appeared in the Venice Biennale (1993, 1995, 2003, 2007, and 2009), Lyon Biennale (1997, 2003, and 2005), and Istanbul Biennial (2001). Parreno studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Grenoble (1983-1988) and at the Institut des Hautes Etudes en arts plastiques at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (1988-1989).

Parreno is represented by Pilar Corrias, London; Air de Paris, Paris; Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin; Barbara Gladstone, New York; and 1301 PE, Los Angeles.