JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL: NEW WORKS
PERROTIN Paris is pleased to present New Works, Jean-Michel Othoniel’s solo exhibition at the gallery.
October 18 – December 20, 2025
Born in the 1960s, in Saint-Étienne, a working-class mining town in central France, Jean-Michel Othoniel grew up amidst the realities of his industrial surroundings. He also had access to the vibrant contemporary collection of the Saint-Étienne Museum of Modern Art, in terms of size, second only to the Pompidou in France. At the age of ten, he encountered the work of American Minimalist Robert Morris, an experience that left a lasting impression. In this new exhibition, the works follow in the footsteps of those shown at the Collection Lambert in Avignon. They reflect the artist’s genuine interest in minimalism and abstraction, showing that beauty and sensuality are in no way at odds with radicality.
From early on, he saw art as a parallel universe, embracing the importance of play, an ethos that would later define his artistic practice. He had moved to Paris to study art, arriving in the 1980s, a transformative period in Western art. Movements such as Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Fluxus, the Situationist International, Arte Povera, and Land Art, with their associated Happenings and Performance Art had reshaped artistic mediums, with transmedia installations becoming mainstream contemporary art. Even as the freedom of artistic expression expanded, the AIDS crisis brought unimaginable suffering and loss to the gay community, profoundly shaping Othoniel’s worldview. His first works were driven by feelings of despair. In 1917, Paul Klee, writing amidst the horrors of World War I, observed: “The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.”
Klee’s words illuminate the subject of the grid in modernist painting—a motif that embodies confinement. Grids, monotonous and relentless, mimic the harsh walls of prison cells. They are at once utterly new and endlessly repetitive, offering no resistance, no escape, no alternative. Yet, paradoxically, it is in this sense of absolute powerlessness that the grid becomes a passage. The grid makes one’s own body into the pathway itself. This duality—confinement and passage—is the key to entering Othoniel’s work, which is deeply shaped by personal experience and transformed by the cultural contexts he engages with. How is the grid a passage? In the same sense a wall is a passage.