P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center presents Jean-Michel Othoniel’s Le Grand Collier (The Large Necklace) from July 5 through August 30, 1998. This 1997 work, one in a series of crystal pieces first exhibited at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, is installed in P.S.1’s duplex gallery.
The enormous necklace is made of giant colored glass and crystal beads manufactured by the famous Oscar Zanetti Glass Studio in Murano, Venice. Strung on wire interwoven with tiny strip lights, the beads have an inner glow that sustains their luminosity when natural light in the gallery decreases.
Instead of perfect spheres, the beads are intentionally irregular—a challenging form to achieve because crystal, like water, naturally forms in symmetrical drops. Zanetti, a master glass blower, found a way to accomplish the imperfect beads for Othoniel, however, by inventing new techniques. One such technique relies on the “memory” of glass: when molten glass is cut or dented, it returns at first to its spherical shape, but once it cools, the “wound” reappears.
Othoniel was born in 1964 in Saint—Etienne, an industrial town in the southern part of France. He became interested in art at age seven after seeing his first art exhibit—a Robert Morris show—at the art museum in Saint—Etienne, and left home at age 18 for the Ecole des Beaux Arts at Cergy—Pontoise. There he forged links to conceptualism and minimalism, working with many different media and subordinating his choice of media to the idea behind the work. In addition to using glass as a media, Othoniel has used sulfur as a sculpting material since 1992, and has also created performance and interactive art pieces.