Thomas Hirschhorn

Thomas Hirschhorn (b. 1957) is among the most important living artists today; he represented Switzerland at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). To experience Hirschhorn’s work is often to enter dizzying environments constructed from mundane materials such as cardboard, newspaper and magazine clippings, television monitors, tape and mirrors. These spaces or sculptures are generally also festooned in slogans, such as media headlines or handwritten quotations from inspirational texts. Hirschhorn is best known for his ‘Presence and Production’ projects in public spaces and institutions, for which he builds temporary constructions to host busy programmes of philosophical, political and artistic activity that are open to all, asserting the artist’s commitment to a ‘non-exclusive public’. Examples of these have included the Gramsci Monument in The Bronx, New York in 2013 and The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival in Amsterdam in 2009. The most recent ‘Presence and Production’ Flamme éternelle, was hosted at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris in early summer 2014.