Pierre Huyghe Brings a Living System to Fondation Beyeler
At Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Pierre Huyghe’s first solo exhibition in a Swiss museum turns the gallery into something closer to an evolving environment than a conventional display. The French contemporary artist, who lives in Santiago, Chile, is presenting a site-specific experience built around recent works that shift, respond, and appear to mutate in relation to one another.
Huyghe has long occupied a singular place in contemporary art for works that braid technology, biology, and unstable forms of life. His reputation was cemented in part by his contribution to Documenta 13 in 2012, where compost, stacks of paving slabs, a replica of a 1930s Max Weber sculpture with a real beehive for a head, and a white dog named Human with one pink-painted leg became part of an installation that resisted easy categorization.
The Fondation Beyeler exhibition continues that line of inquiry. According to the museum’s description, the works are arranged as “a set of relations that continually reconfigure themselves, giving rise to new narratives.” Among the most striking is *Apnea* (2026), described as an “artificial breathing organ” submerged in a glass water tank. The piece suggests a body both mechanical and vulnerable, suspended between function and metaphor.
Two video works deepen that atmosphere of instability. *Liminals* (2025) centers on a faceless figure moving through shifting states in what the museum describes as a realm outside time and space. *Camata* (2024), meanwhile, shows machines carrying out what appears to be a ritual around a skeleton in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The work is not fixed in a single form: it is continuously re-edited in real time through sensors embedded in the exhibition space.
That responsiveness is central to Huyghe’s practice, which often treats the artwork as a system rather than an object. At Fondation Beyeler, the result is less a sequence of discrete pieces than an interlocking field of images, mechanisms, and biological references that keeps changing as the viewer moves through it.
Pierre Huyghe, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, until September 13
