Footnotes

Provenance
Pilar Corrias, London
Acquired from the above by the current owner



Phillippe Parreno is widely recognised for his ability to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, engaging with the liminal spaces that lie between. Preferring the title of exhibition producer over artist, Parreno resists categorisation by genre, style, subject, or medium. His work spans a diverse body of media, including film, sculpture, drawing, text and performance, yet it is the exhibition itself that he considers his primary medium, placing its construction at the heart of his process. Exploring the possibilities of the exhibition as a coherent 'object' rather than as a collection of individual works, it becomes a veritable open space, a format that differs on each occasion, and a frame for things to appear and disappear.

Parreno's multifaceted practice further explores themes of memory, temporality, and perception, seeking modes of communication that go beyond language. In doing so, the artist redefines the exhibition as a living, responsive system, one that unfolds like a narrative, inviting continuous reinterpretation.

Happy Ending is perfectly representative of Parreno idiosyncratic practice. In the present work a blown-glass lamp sculpture emits a ghostly presence through its ethereal illumination. The delicate craftsmanship of the blown glass, juxtaposed with the raw, industrial aesthetic of the exposed electrical wiring, exemplifies the tension and duality central to Philippe Parreno's artistic practice. Over the course of his career, the artist has exhibited various iterations of this work, beginning with a solo exhibition in 1996 at Ynglingagatan 1, an alternative art space in Stockholm. The piece shown in this initial presentation was based on a lamp originally designed by renowned architect and designer Eero Saarinen for a hotel that was never realised, intended to be built on the very site of the gallery. In this exhibition, the lamp glowed with no visible wiring or discernible power source, enhancing the work's spectral and otherworldly quality, a hallmark of the series. At the conclusion of the show, the lamp mysteriously disappeared, further reinforcing the enigmatic, ghostlike aura that surrounds the work.

The following year, Parreno presented a series of blown-glass sculptures at Air de Paris, each serving as a re-interpretation of earlier works that no longer existed. Among these was a glass recreation of the Saarinen-designed lamp that had mysteriously vanished from the 1996 Stockholm exhibition. Parreno titled the series Happy Ending, Stockholm, 1996, emphasizing the spectral legacy and enduring absence of the original piece. During the course of the exhibition, four of the five sculptures were either broken or stolen, further contributing to the mythic and elusive narrative surrounding the series. The only surviving example is now held in the collection of the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain (FNAC) in France. In Happy Ending, the lamps reemerge, with each crystal lamp exhibiting subtle variations that distinguish it from the others, yet they collectively maintain a direct reference to their absent predecessors, evoking a spectral or ghostly presence. This motif of ghosts, representing both the persistence of memory and the trace of absence, is a central and recurring theme in Parreno's oeuvre. The artist explores the tension between presence and absence, materiality and immateriality, using ghostly figures and remnants to challenge notions of temporality, continuity, and the ways in which history and memory haunt the present.

Parreno has been consistently celebrated since his emergence in the mid-1990s. He was the first artist to take over the entire gallery space of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, for his 2013 exhibition Anywhere, Anywhere Out, and in 2016, he was selected for the Hyundai Commission in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London.

Happy Ending represents the culmination of Parreno's prescient concerns with themes of time, performance, history, and interdisciplinarity. His practice is characterised by continual transformation in response to diverse global contexts, yet each iteration remains firmly anchored in these fundamental concerns. Rather than functioning as a mere symbol of artifice, the work embodies a sincere investment in the experiential pleasures of spectatorship and participatory engagement. Above all, it captivates the viewer, inviting immersion into an enigmatic and unfamiliar realm.