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Lot Essay
A striking work, full of allure and art historical savvy, Marquee by Algerian-born, Paris-based artist Philippe Parreno is the result of his decades-long exploration of the performative aesthetic. A highlight of his ongoing Marquee series, begun in 2006, this work glows with the familiar lights of the stage, beckoning us to merge with its warm, dazzling light. With its otherworldly presence, Marquee is both a beautiful object and a reminder of the time-based nature of film and art; the marquee is present upon entering the theater, and it shines through the darkness of night when we exit. As an icon of contemporary art in multiple media, Parreno consistently reaches out to us and creates situations that inspire reflection and connectivity.
About seven feet long and three feet deep, Marquee is life size, transforming the space into the site of a performance borne of a loving nostalgia. The sign, reminiscent of Hollywood, Broadway, and the West End, is becoming an artifact of a past urban experience as it continues to disappear from cityscapes. In Marquee we can experience this fabulous relic and consider how contemporary art, especially Parreno’s, is both of its time and always cognizant of the incandescent past. As the artist has observed, “I like to think about a space as a battery,” and here he lights up our world with the industrialized glow of cinema and performance (P. Parreno, quoted in T. Eccles, “Philippe Parreno,” ArtReview, vol. 67, no. 7, October 2015, p. 80).
Marquee also illustrates the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of Parreno’s practice. In iterations of his exhibitions of the Marquee works, he invited fellow artists Tino Sehgal and Liam Gillick, as well as musicians Thomas Bartlett and Robert A.A. Lowe, to create music in response to them. “It’s a beautiful series of objects…I would like to see how the Marquees might even produce the soundtrack of movies,” Parreno muses, and the viewer would be an extra, or even a star in the resulting narrative (Ibid., p. 80). It makes sense that Parreno has been inspired by Jasper Johns, who likewise used lightbulbs to conceptual and cheeky effect in works like the sculpture English Light Bulb (1970). Also relevant is Joseph Beuys’s Capri Battery (1985)—a light powered by a lemon—or we might go back even further to the still-new electric light of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge (1892-1895). If in Toulouse-Lautrec’s work the electric lightbulb is a cutting-edge marker of modernity, Parreno’s Marquee gestures toward obsolescence, a sublime and Gothic evocation of time’s passage.
Parreno has been consistently celebrated since his emergence in the mid-1990s. He was the first artist to take over the entire gallery space of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, for his 2013 exhibition Anywhere, Anywhere Out, and in 2016, he was selected for the Hyundai Commission in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London. Included in numerous prestigious collections, Parreno has mounted celebrated solo exhibitions. Recent selections include: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (2022), Foundation Beyeler, Basel (2021), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019), Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018), and Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2017).
Marquee is the culmination of Parreno’s prescient concerns about time, performance, history, and interdisciplinarity. His work is always changing in response to sites across the world, and yet each iteration is rooted in these pressing concepts. Marquee is not a symbol of artifice, but rather an earnest investment in the pleasures of viewership and participatory art. Above all, it is alluring, drawing us into the unknown world beyond its signage and asking us to step through its glow and onto the darkened stage.
About seven feet long and three feet deep, Marquee is life size, transforming the space into the site of a performance borne of a loving nostalgia. The sign, reminiscent of Hollywood, Broadway, and the West End, is becoming an artifact of a past urban experience as it continues to disappear from cityscapes. In Marquee we can experience this fabulous relic and consider how contemporary art, especially Parreno’s, is both of its time and always cognizant of the incandescent past. As the artist has observed, “I like to think about a space as a battery,” and here he lights up our world with the industrialized glow of cinema and performance (P. Parreno, quoted in T. Eccles, “Philippe Parreno,” ArtReview, vol. 67, no. 7, October 2015, p. 80).
Marquee also illustrates the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of Parreno’s practice. In iterations of his exhibitions of the Marquee works, he invited fellow artists Tino Sehgal and Liam Gillick, as well as musicians Thomas Bartlett and Robert A.A. Lowe, to create music in response to them. “It’s a beautiful series of objects…I would like to see how the Marquees might even produce the soundtrack of movies,” Parreno muses, and the viewer would be an extra, or even a star in the resulting narrative (Ibid., p. 80). It makes sense that Parreno has been inspired by Jasper Johns, who likewise used lightbulbs to conceptual and cheeky effect in works like the sculpture English Light Bulb (1970). Also relevant is Joseph Beuys’s Capri Battery (1985)—a light powered by a lemon—or we might go back even further to the still-new electric light of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge (1892-1895). If in Toulouse-Lautrec’s work the electric lightbulb is a cutting-edge marker of modernity, Parreno’s Marquee gestures toward obsolescence, a sublime and Gothic evocation of time’s passage.
Parreno has been consistently celebrated since his emergence in the mid-1990s. He was the first artist to take over the entire gallery space of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, for his 2013 exhibition Anywhere, Anywhere Out, and in 2016, he was selected for the Hyundai Commission in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London. Included in numerous prestigious collections, Parreno has mounted celebrated solo exhibitions. Recent selections include: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (2022), Foundation Beyeler, Basel (2021), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019), Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018), and Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2017).
Marquee is the culmination of Parreno’s prescient concerns about time, performance, history, and interdisciplinarity. His work is always changing in response to sites across the world, and yet each iteration is rooted in these pressing concepts. Marquee is not a symbol of artifice, but rather an earnest investment in the pleasures of viewership and participatory art. Above all, it is alluring, drawing us into the unknown world beyond its signage and asking us to step through its glow and onto the darkened stage.