Pierre Bonnefille: Meditation Room
Musée National des arts asiatiques – Guimet presents ‘Meditation eoom’ at Hôtel d’Heidelbach by French artist Pierre Bonnefille, an installation inviting reflection and contemplation.
Musée National des arts asiatiques – Guimet presents ‘Meditation room’ at Hôtel d’Heidelbach by French artist Pierre Bonnefille. Invited by the Musée Guimet at the occasion of Paris Design Week 2021, Bonnefille has created a space that invites contemplation and reflection. Alongside this is a series of works and pieces by furniture inspired by Asia in conversation with the museum’s Chinese collections.
As the central work of the exhibition, ‘Meditation room’ is set in an 18th-century wood-panelled living room. Constructed as a monumental circular room, the piece offers an immersive environment lined with Bonnefille’s Bronze Paintings. The paintings themselves are golden and grand in scale. Arranged within the circular space, they reflect light inwards. Unfolding across the entire frame of the structure, their surfaces are irregular, alternating between shine and matte and encouraging movement within the space in order to test the visual possibilities. As a black box on the outside, with gold on the inside, the work slips between the mediums of sculpture, architecture, painting, and photography. Several stools are also placed inside ‘Meditation room’, inviting viewers to rest and engage in a moment of contemplation.
Beyond the installation lie the adjacent Chinese collections. Series of objects and unique furniture pieces punctuate the space. Links with nature, colour, and light are omnipresent in Bonnefille’s work, and we find them here through an exploration of forms and materials that evoke elements of plants and minerals. On the walls hang paintings on paper from the Furoshiki series, which echo the art of traditional Japanese packaging that has existed since the Nara period (8th century).
Drawn and collected from his travels to Japan, China, India and South-East Asia, Pierre Bonnefille places equal numbers of natural and handcrafted elements within the exhibition. The works presented in this exhibition at Hôtel d’Heidelbach bear witness to the memories of these journeys and the artist’s observations.
‘Meditation room’ by Pierre Bonnefille is on show at Musée National des arts asiatiques – Guimet until September 20, 2021.
Images @Luca Bonnefille.
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