Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Julian Charrière’s first US solo museum exhibition, Concentrations 63: Julian Charrière, Towards No Earthly Pole opening May 2 at the Dallas Museum of Art.
Julian Charrière creates work that bridges the realms of environmental science and cultural history. Based on scientific research and expeditions to remote regions of the Earth, his sculptures, photographs, and films investigate the irreversible transformation of the natural world by human activity. Charrière references pre-human origins, global explorers of the past, present-day climate change, and the planet’s uncertain future. While his works address environmental exploitation, they also emphasize nature’s magnificence and resilience.
This major exhibition brings together five significant bodies of work by Charrière, culminating with the artist’s most recent video project, Towards No Earthly Pole. The featured works exemplify Charrière’s diverse and exploratory practice, The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories, 2013, a series of photographs documenting the artist’s futile attempt to melt an iceberg; Tropisme, 2016, an installation of tropical plants preserved by cryogenic freezing; And Beneath It All Flows Liquid Fire, 2019, a video for which Charrière set a fountain aflame and recorded the dueling elements of fire and water; Not All Who Wander Are Lost, 2019, a series of glacial erratic rock sculptures; and Towards No Earthly Pole, 2019, a 102-minute film, presented as a large-scale cinematic environment that combines nighttime drone footage of glaciers captured by Charrière in Greenland, Iceland, and the Alps. Illuminated by a moving artificial light, the glacial landscape reveals both the seductive mystery and power of nature, as well as the rapidly increasing effects of climate change.
Towards No Earthly Pole premiered in Switzerland at Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana (MASI), Lugano and Aargauer Kunsthaus, Arau, and at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. An exhibition catalog was co-published by MASI Lugano, Aargauer Kunsthaus, and the Dallas Museum of Art, which includes an essay by Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, the Dallas Museum of Art’s Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, and curator of the DMA exhibition.