Exhibition Period: 14 July (Friday) – 31 October (Tuesday), 2017
Mon-Sat 11:00-20:00 (Last entry 19:30),
Sun 11:00-19:00 (Last entry 18:30)
Open daily
Free admission
Venue： Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum
（8F, 5-4-1 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo, Japan TEL: 03-3569-3300）
Organized by： Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
Under the auspices of: Embassy of France/Institut français du Japon
Fondation d’entreprise Hermès is pleased to present the exhibition ATM tempo I/II/III by Emmanuel Saulnier. Emmanuel Saulnier was born in 1952 in Paris, and has been active as an artist since the late 1970s. In 1986, he was artist-in-residence at the Villa Médici in Rome, and afterward became known primarily for works employing glass. As a sculptor, Saulnier transcends the bounds of academic art and actively engages with society and emphasizing reinterpretation of history through dialogues with people, while in addition to producing artwork, he is a researcher and educator at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Saulnier is currently based in Paris and Turkey, and has a close relationship with Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. In addition to a solo exhibition at the foundation’s La Verrière gallery (Brussels, 2002), he served as a mentor in a residence program for young artists (2010-14).
Saulnier’s sculptural works reference historical events and tragedies with which he is familiar, and consistently pose primal questions about the nature of human existence. His glass objects filled with water or black ink represent the human figure in its essence, and seem to hint at both the weight of the human body covered or trapped in thin film, and its fragility and transience when it becomes transparent.
In the work, Place noire, Saulnier laid down black fragments of asphalt in a courtyard to create a temporary earth-surface, creating a rich yet stunningly silent metaphor for the uncertainty of the footing beneath us in which we place such confidence, and the fate of history to be overwritten and obscured.
This exhibition developed out of Saulnier’s solo show Black Dancing held at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in February 2017, and was conceived as a tribute to jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. Inspired by the performances of Monk, who played in Japan in 1963, the artist assembled three parts (tempo I/II/III) like a piece of music. The exhibition also presents works by other artists with whom Saulnier is closely involved and shares artistic practices and philosophy in various contexts, highlighting the ways in which contemporary artists expand their activities through various networks.