Pierre Huyghe
Hauser & Wirth London | Old Bond St
The white cube is “a curious piece of real estate,” as Brian O’Doherty once wrote; with Pierre Huyghe, this property just gets curiouser and curiouser. Ordinarily, an art gallery is a clean, bright place, the exclusive domain of Homo sapiens. In Huyghe’s exhibition “In. Border. Deep.,” it became a dark, cavernous home for strange life forms.
The space was sliced into two oddly shaped halves. The first housed some extraordinary variations on the idea of “living sculpture,” along with a wall work, about which more later. In the second, further subdivided into two irregular black boxes, two short films were screened concurrently. De-extinction (all works 2014) shows prehistoric insects trapped in thirty-million-year-old sap; close-ups of their broken corpses are accompanied by the amplified, thunderous whirs and jolts of the camera. The other film, Human Mask—the artwork that
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