Pierre Huyghe - Your Art History Reference Guide!

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Pierre Huyghe

Pierre Huyghe (born 1962) is an acclaimed French artist who works in a variety of media, from film and video to public interventions. He trained at the Ecole Normale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, graduating in 1985.

He started his artist career with the painters group called Les Frères Ripoulin along with another acclaimed French artist, Claude Closky.

Much of Huyghe's work examines the structural properties of film and its problematic relationship to reality. His two-channel video The Third Memory (1999), for example, takes as its starting point Sidney Lumet's 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino in the role of the gay bank robber John Wojtowicz. Huyghe's video reconstructs the set of Lumet's film, but he allows Wojtowicz himself--now a few dozen years older and out of jail--to tell the story of the robbery. Huyghe juxtaposes images from the reconstruction with footage from Dog Day Afternoon, demonstrating that Wojtowicz's memory has been irrevocably altered by the film about his life.

In 2001 Huyghe represented France at the Venice Biennale. His pavilion, entitled Le Château de Turing, won a special prize from the jury.

In 2002 Huyghe won the Hugo Boss Prize from the Guggenheim Museum, exhibiting several works there the following year.

His last name is pronounced something like "wheeg," with the "wh" as in a foppish English "what."

Last updated: 10-22-2005 18:01:04
Last updated: 01-04-2007 01:18:57
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