Dunepark
2009
World War II bunker excavation at Duindorp, Den Haag
Cyprien Gaillard escavated a German bunker which was buried in a hill overlooking the beach of Scheveningen. This is an area already undergoing drastic transformation as the existing communities and industries are displaced to make way for new housing developments. Gaillard's project comments obliquely on this process of gentrification and the way in which outmoded architecture is buried or hidden beneath new layers of urban development. This work, titled Dunepark – a rough translation of its location – can be seen as the embodiment of the 'Bunker Archeology' carried out by the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio in his eponymous 1975 book and exhibition. For Gaillard, the physical process of excavating is a form of negative sculpting. He sees this submerged bunker as a buried readymade. With the help of large earth-moving equipment and volunteers of the Foundation Atlantikwall Museum Scheveningen, Gaillard digged out this massive form to reveal it in all its brutalist glory, before recovering it once more.
2009
World War II bunker excavation at Duindorp, Den Haag
Cyprien Gaillard escavated a German bunker which was buried in a hill overlooking the beach of Scheveningen. This is an area already undergoing drastic transformation as the existing communities and industries are displaced to make way for new housing developments. Gaillard's project comments obliquely on this process of gentrification and the way in which outmoded architecture is buried or hidden beneath new layers of urban development. This work, titled Dunepark – a rough translation of its location – can be seen as the embodiment of the 'Bunker Archeology' carried out by the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio in his eponymous 1975 book and exhibition. For Gaillard, the physical process of excavating is a form of negative sculpting. He sees this submerged bunker as a buried readymade. With the help of large earth-moving equipment and volunteers of the Foundation Atlantikwall Museum Scheveningen, Gaillard digged out this massive form to reveal it in all its brutalist glory, before recovering it once more.
Dunepark
2009
World War II bunker excavation at Duindorp, Den Haag
Cyprien Gaillard escavated a German bunker which was buried in a hill overlooking the beach of Scheveningen. This is an area already undergoing drastic transformation as the existing communities and industries are displaced to make way for new housing developments. Gaillard's project comments obliquely on this process of gentrification and the way in which outmoded architecture is buried or hidden beneath new layers of urban development. This work, titled Dunepark – a rough translation of its location – can be seen as the embodiment of the 'Bunker Archeology' carried out by the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio in his eponymous 1975 book and exhibition. For Gaillard, the physical process of excavating is a form of negative sculpting. He sees this submerged bunker as a buried readymade. With the help of large earth-moving equipment and volunteers of the Foundation Atlantikwall Museum Scheveningen, Gaillard digged out this massive form to reveal it in all its brutalist glory, before recovering it once more.
2009
World War II bunker excavation at Duindorp, Den Haag
Cyprien Gaillard escavated a German bunker which was buried in a hill overlooking the beach of Scheveningen. This is an area already undergoing drastic transformation as the existing communities and industries are displaced to make way for new housing developments. Gaillard's project comments obliquely on this process of gentrification and the way in which outmoded architecture is buried or hidden beneath new layers of urban development. This work, titled Dunepark – a rough translation of its location – can be seen as the embodiment of the 'Bunker Archeology' carried out by the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio in his eponymous 1975 book and exhibition. For Gaillard, the physical process of excavating is a form of negative sculpting. He sees this submerged bunker as a buried readymade. With the help of large earth-moving equipment and volunteers of the Foundation Atlantikwall Museum Scheveningen, Gaillard digged out this massive form to reveal it in all its brutalist glory, before recovering it once more.
Dunepark
2009
World War II bunker excavation at Duindorp, Den Haag
Cyprien Gaillard escavated a German bunker which was buried in a hill overlooking the beach of Scheveningen. This is an area already undergoing drastic transformation as the existing communities and industries are displaced to make way for new housing developments. Gaillard's project comments obliquely on this process of gentrification and the way in which outmoded architecture is buried or hidden beneath new layers of urban development. This work, titled Dunepark – a rough translation of its location – can be seen as the embodiment of the 'Bunker Archeology' carried out by the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio in his eponymous 1975 book and exhibition. For Gaillard, the physical process of excavating is a form of negative sculpting. He sees this submerged bunker as a buried readymade. With the help of large earth-moving equipment and volunteers of the Foundation Atlantikwall Museum Scheveningen, Gaillard digged out this massive form to reveal it in all its brutalist glory, before recovering it once more.
2009
World War II bunker excavation at Duindorp, Den Haag
Cyprien Gaillard escavated a German bunker which was buried in a hill overlooking the beach of Scheveningen. This is an area already undergoing drastic transformation as the existing communities and industries are displaced to make way for new housing developments. Gaillard's project comments obliquely on this process of gentrification and the way in which outmoded architecture is buried or hidden beneath new layers of urban development. This work, titled Dunepark – a rough translation of its location – can be seen as the embodiment of the 'Bunker Archeology' carried out by the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio in his eponymous 1975 book and exhibition. For Gaillard, the physical process of excavating is a form of negative sculpting. He sees this submerged bunker as a buried readymade. With the help of large earth-moving equipment and volunteers of the Foundation Atlantikwall Museum Scheveningen, Gaillard digged out this massive form to reveal it in all its brutalist glory, before recovering it once more.
Cenotaph to 12 Riverford Road, Pollokshaw, Glasgow 2008
2008
Recycled concrete and building detritus from demolished housing estate, cement, steel, frame
157.48 x 78.74 x 78.74 inches
Pièce unique
Gaillard's sculpture Cenotaph to 12 Riverford Road, Pollokshaws, Glasgow is made from 15 tonnes of concrete salvaged from the remains of a Glaswegian Modernist social housing project demolished in advance of the city's hosting of the 2014 Commonwealth Games, transported to London and then cast into an obelisk. The word "cenotaph" betokens a monument to someone or something whose remains are elsewhere, and at first reading this seems an inappropriate designation for this obelisk – it is formed, after all, from the leavings of the building it memorializes. Perhaps, though, what is being remembered here is not the physical stuff or concrete, brick and glass, but rather a devalued history, and a devalued dream.
2008
Recycled concrete and building detritus from demolished housing estate, cement, steel, frame
157.48 x 78.74 x 78.74 inches
Pièce unique
Gaillard's sculpture Cenotaph to 12 Riverford Road, Pollokshaws, Glasgow is made from 15 tonnes of concrete salvaged from the remains of a Glaswegian Modernist social housing project demolished in advance of the city's hosting of the 2014 Commonwealth Games, transported to London and then cast into an obelisk. The word "cenotaph" betokens a monument to someone or something whose remains are elsewhere, and at first reading this seems an inappropriate designation for this obelisk – it is formed, after all, from the leavings of the building it memorializes. Perhaps, though, what is being remembered here is not the physical stuff or concrete, brick and glass, but rather a devalued history, and a devalued dream.
Le canard de Beaugrenelle
2008
Bronze, concrete
78.74 x 59.06 x 78.74 inches
Pièce unique
Cyprien GAILLARD's gesture of bringing a barely movable bronze duck from Beaugrenelle, a city of tower blocks bordering the Seine in Paris's 15th arrondissement, to the terrace surrounding the Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie — a gift from a failed, urban community to the high-architecture context of the hallowed plateau adjoining the museum — is a bitter comment on the successes and defeats of the architectural utopias of modernism. The duck becomes a new symbol and symptom of the ruined ideals of social housing projects of the 1960s and 1970s and the politics of art in public space or a present day “non-site.”
2008
Bronze, concrete
78.74 x 59.06 x 78.74 inches
Pièce unique
Cyprien GAILLARD's gesture of bringing a barely movable bronze duck from Beaugrenelle, a city of tower blocks bordering the Seine in Paris's 15th arrondissement, to the terrace surrounding the Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie — a gift from a failed, urban community to the high-architecture context of the hallowed plateau adjoining the museum — is a bitter comment on the successes and defeats of the architectural utopias of modernism. The duck becomes a new symbol and symptom of the ruined ideals of social housing projects of the 1960s and 1970s and the politics of art in public space or a present day “non-site.”
The Arena and the Wasteland
2008
393.7 x 196.85 x 196.85 inches
Pièce unique
With 'The Arena and the Wasteland', GAILLARD exposes a vast piece of empty land at Skulpturenpark Berlin-Zentrum by placing a series of tall light masts in a circular configuration on the open field. Strangely disturbing and blindingly bright, their lights turned on at night without evident reason or specific event to be lit, reveal the flat site's mix of postwar rubble and garbage — a horizontal pendant to nocturnally lit “real” public monuments. GAILLARD pays homage to what he sees as an “oasis” in a desert of failed architecture of West German housing projects from the 1950s.
2008
393.7 x 196.85 x 196.85 inches
Pièce unique
With 'The Arena and the Wasteland', GAILLARD exposes a vast piece of empty land at Skulpturenpark Berlin-Zentrum by placing a series of tall light masts in a circular configuration on the open field. Strangely disturbing and blindingly bright, their lights turned on at night without evident reason or specific event to be lit, reveal the flat site's mix of postwar rubble and garbage — a horizontal pendant to nocturnally lit “real” public monuments. GAILLARD pays homage to what he sees as an “oasis” in a desert of failed architecture of West German housing projects from the 1950s.
La grande allée du Château de Oiron
2008
La grande allée du château de Oiron is firstly a permanent installation by Cyprien Gaillard (born in 1980 in Paris, lives and works in Berlin), part of the 'parc aux ruines' that the artist has undertaken to build throughout the world: here, he had dozens of tons of crushed rubble from a demolished tower block of Issy-les-Moulineaux dumped on the main alley of the Renaissance castle of Oiron (West of France). At the same time discrete and spectacular, the artist's intervention takes visitors to step on the ruins of modernist utopies to access a piece of heritage.
La grande allée du château de Oiron is also the title of the photography that documents this intervention, taking after Düsseldorf school of photograph's codes while pushing them to their ultimate stage: monumentality, frontality, absence of narration – it is impossible to identify the season of the year or the time of the day; but instead of picturing an arrogant modernist building, only remains a pyramid of ruins.
2008
La grande allée du château de Oiron is firstly a permanent installation by Cyprien Gaillard (born in 1980 in Paris, lives and works in Berlin), part of the 'parc aux ruines' that the artist has undertaken to build throughout the world: here, he had dozens of tons of crushed rubble from a demolished tower block of Issy-les-Moulineaux dumped on the main alley of the Renaissance castle of Oiron (West of France). At the same time discrete and spectacular, the artist's intervention takes visitors to step on the ruins of modernist utopies to access a piece of heritage.
La grande allée du château de Oiron is also the title of the photography that documents this intervention, taking after Düsseldorf school of photograph's codes while pushing them to their ultimate stage: monumentality, frontality, absence of narration – it is impossible to identify the season of the year or the time of the day; but instead of picturing an arrogant modernist building, only remains a pyramid of ruins.
Homes & Graves & Gardens # 1
2007
Installation at the International Center of Art and Landscape of Vassivière Island.
For his exhibition at Centre d'art et du paysage de l'île de Vassivière Cyprien GAILLARD masked the facade of the center by a line of trees, cut down on the island for the occasion. Leaning against one side of the building, these trees block the entrance, profoundly modifying the building's appearance. The center thus become a vestige of the past, adopting Cyprien GAILLARD's sculptural viewpoint through the dead mass of the trees which carry within the notion of the inexorable march of time, of transformation and degradation. But this also constitutes a pictorial and conceptual inspiration through the evident analogy with the famous painting by Arnold BOCKLIN, 'The Isle of Dead'.
2007
Installation at the International Center of Art and Landscape of Vassivière Island.
For his exhibition at Centre d'art et du paysage de l'île de Vassivière Cyprien GAILLARD masked the facade of the center by a line of trees, cut down on the island for the occasion. Leaning against one side of the building, these trees block the entrance, profoundly modifying the building's appearance. The center thus become a vestige of the past, adopting Cyprien GAILLARD's sculptural viewpoint through the dead mass of the trees which carry within the notion of the inexorable march of time, of transformation and degradation. But this also constitutes a pictorial and conceptual inspiration through the evident analogy with the famous painting by Arnold BOCKLIN, 'The Isle of Dead'.
Homes & Graves & Gardens # 2
2007
On July 14, 2007 for the opening of his solo exhibition at Centre international d'art et du paysage de l'île de Vassivière, Cyprien Gaillard asked to have the traditional fireworks exploded inside the lighthouse. The viewer could experience the show through the sound and traces of the explosion. Echoing the exterior overgrowth of the trees on the other building, the interior tension of the fireworks imposes itself on the space like an experiment with neither concession nor illusion. The ephemeral quality of the fireworks give prominence to history, to tranformation and to dissolution through their residual traces.
2007
On July 14, 2007 for the opening of his solo exhibition at Centre international d'art et du paysage de l'île de Vassivière, Cyprien Gaillard asked to have the traditional fireworks exploded inside the lighthouse. The viewer could experience the show through the sound and traces of the explosion. Echoing the exterior overgrowth of the trees on the other building, the interior tension of the fireworks imposes itself on the space like an experiment with neither concession nor illusion. The ephemeral quality of the fireworks give prominence to history, to tranformation and to dissolution through their residual traces.