HANNOVER.- Pierre Huyghe (born 1962, Paris), the winner of the 2015 Kurt Schwitters Prize awarded by the Lower Saxony Sparkassen Foundation, presents his new exhibition Orphan Patterns in the extension of the Sprengel Museum Hannover.

The title Orphan Patterns encompasses ideas found in the field of computability and biology, game studies or in any form of lineage.

Huyghe has developed a ritualistic path through the new ten exhibition halls of the museum where the visitor wanders, with sequences of appearance and disappearance, different in both time and individual response. As in the artist’s previous situated works, in a compost of simple process, a set of circumstances and conditions, animals, humans, machines evolve and unpredictability emerges.

In the entrance, sediments from the walls of various museums, particles of matter from previous exhibitions, for example the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), are spread like semen on the floor of the virgin museum. The next rooms will be soiled by the ones who cross them.

A dice carved in amber contains two mating insects randomly captured and stopped in their reproduction and lifetime millions years ago.

Alive descendants of the same species are growing and flying by thousands in the space, genetically modified.

A human couple wearing light masks, that attract the photosensitive insects, play with the dices and follow their instructions. Their light exchange is programmed according to instinct behaviours, sequences of seduction signal, bioluminescent flash pattern that insects emit prior copulation. Aside the Mating Masks, there is Orphan, a light mask with an auto-generative and chaotic program.

The next appearance, the film De-extinction, presents a macroscopic navigation through a stone, in search of the earliest mating scene, an instant frozen in time inhabited by entities suspended in their activity, almost alive in their presence.

A swarm of people with light masks at different intensity roam in one space on the opening day.

The interaction of art and life, which has been central to the Merzkunst of Kurt Schwitters, is found in Huyghe’s dynamic network of heterogeneous animated elements, in the co-activity between animal, human being, artifact and machine. These cultural foundations, in connection with the movement of living entities and the uncertainty of a time axis, form the basis for the French artist’s striking and meticulously set environments.

Huyghe’s work has been most recently exhibited in a 2013-2015 retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, and in 2015 for the Roof Garden Commission at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His contribution to dOCUMENTA(13), with his project Untilled (2012) in the Karlsaue Park, was one of the exhibition most important work. He has received the Special Jury Prize for the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2001), the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2002), the Smithsonian Museum’s Contemporary Artist Award (2010) and the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, Zurich (2013).