Courtesy of the artists
Exhibition Period: 21st December (Wednesday), 2016 –
26th February (Sunday), 2017
Mon-Sat 11:00-20:00 (Last entry 19:30),
Sun 11:00-19:00 (Last entry 18:30)
Open daily (Except for store closing day)
Free admission
Organized by: Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
Supported by: Gallery SO London, YAMAMOTO GENDAI,
Hiko Mizuno College of Jewelry
Under the auspices of: Embassy of Switzerland,
Embassy of France/Institut français du Japon
Fondation d’entreprise Hermès is pleased to present the exhibition featuring works by three artists of different generations, nationalities, and working methods, which explore the relationships between work and human body.
Through his jewelry, designed to be worn on the body, Swiss jewelry artist Bernhard Schobinger straightforwardly conveys the materiality of the body, its strength, weakness, and desires. His jewelry pieces employing found objects such as pieces of broken glass seduce the viewer with their free, bold, and invulnerable forms. Bodily adornments, historically linked to both love and power and always the object of desire, here seem to effect a subtle reversal of the power dynamic, and to revel in their role, for the first time, in the absence of the human body.
The French painter Anne Laure Sacriste has consistently explored the realm of painterly expression. During the Renaissance, after mastering the technique of perspective, painters were able to transfer their own vantage points to the viewer. Thereafter, new advances such as the camera and video technology were made, but now as then, we remain unable to break through to the other side of the picture plane. Is it that what continues to enchant us most is the ambiguous and uncertain zone that lies beyond a painting’s vanishing point? In this show, Sacriste superimposes the poetic and geometric abstraction seen in Paolo Uccello’s 15th-century painting The Battle of San Romano and a rock garden in Kyoto, compellingly presenting a fluid and relativistic relationship between inside and outside, the part and the whole.
Berlin-based artist Nile Koetting works primarily with intangible materials such as light and sound waves, while experimenting with the transformation of phenomena such as signals and scents into new modes of physical sensation and communication. While Koetting draws on the Italian philosopher Mario Perniola’s Enigmas, his work shows a resonance with the punk ethos of apathy and “no future,” as a steadfast attitude toward the ongoing “objectification” of the human being. In his highly personal installations, he advances a futuristic view of the body and physicality, and new perceptions of the public realm.
The physical relationships between artists and the incredible range of materials they use have parallels with the transactions we carry out in our daily lives, our private dialogues and relationships of constraint and control. However, in their expressions, the artist explores the materiality of the medium and rediscovers its physicality, the two deliver stimuli to one another, and finally weave autonomous, expanding and transcendent relationships. We invite you to enjoy the subtle complicity among object, body, and space that these three artists generate through their unique placement of the work of art in opposition to the body.