SHANGHAI.- TANK Shanghai announces the solo exhibition “Cosmic Clock” by French artist Jean-Marie Appriou. The exhibition will open on November 11, 2025, and remain on view through March 8, 2026.
Beneath the circular dome of the TANK Shanghai, Jean-Marie Appriou unfolds Cosmic Clock as a vast respiration of matter and time.The exhibition takes the form of a living cycle—an astral clock in which each sculpture becomes a sign, a rhythm, a pulse of the universe.Within the monumental shell of a former oil tank—an architecture born from transformation and flow—Appriou orchestrates a passage between biology and astronomy, mythology and alchemy, East and West.
Shaped in aluminum, bronze, and blown glass, his sculptures seem to emerge from a world in metamorphosis.They hover between the vegetal and the mineral, the human and the animal, the terrestrial and the celestial.
Each form breathes, as if animated by the slow memory of the elements.In Cosmic Clock, Appriou reinvents the zodiac as a universal language—a map of correspondences between forms, elements, and times.
The TANK Shanghai becomes a celestial observatory, an immense living clock where civilizations converse, where myth speaks through metal, and where sculpture becomes the breath of the cosmos.
“L’œuvre d’Appriou ne cherche pas à figer la matière : elle la pense, la rêve, la fait se souvenir d’elle-même.Elle révèle la conscience de la forme dans le devenir du monde.” — Donatien Grau
Jean-Marie Appriou graduated from the École régionale des Beaux-Arts de Rennes in 2010, and has since developed a remarkable technical mastery of materials — aluminium, bronze, glass, clay, and wax — to bring to life imaginary worlds teeming with human, animal, and vegetal figures. Spanning from archaic eras to futuristic civilizations, and from dinosaurs to child astronauts, Appriou creates visions that verge on the psychedelic, blending pop culture with mythology — from Ancient Greece and Egypt to science fiction.
His works have been shown at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Musée du Louvre, Paris; Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles; Musée des Abattoirs, Toulouse; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Consortium, Dijon; Villa Medicis, Roma; Lyon Biennale; 7th edition of the Jing’an international Sculpture Project, Shanghai; and on the Giza plateau, Egypt.
He was invited by Public Art Fund to present a group of sculptures on the Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, New York, at the Central Wharf Park, Boston as well as at the Château de Versailles.
In 2023, he was selected by Donatien Grau to create an etching, the Constellation du Louvre (2023), the copper plate of which was added to the Louvre collections.
Jean-Marie Appriou has had solo exhibitions at Perrotin, Paris and Shanghai; Jan Kaps, Cologne; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich and Vienna; Kaikai Kiki, Tokyo; C L E A R I N G New York, Brussels and Los Angeles; and MASSIMODECARLO, London and Hong Kong.
