A selective overview of the artist's production.
Introduced by a retrospective essay by French art critic and curator
Stéphanie Moisdon, this book is a selective overview of the artist's production, accompanied by a conversation with British artist
Liam Gillick, and a focus on the "Characters to be reactivated" series by French art critic and theoretician
Nicolas Bourriaud. In his essay the latter states that, "with the help of installations that affect the exhibition site, Joseph offers us experimental objects, active products, and artworks that suggest new ways of apprehending the real and new types of investment in the art world."
With his fellow artists
Philippe Parreno,
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Bernard Joisten, Pierre Joseph (born 1965 in Caen, lives and works in Paris) contributes to the redefinition of the aesthetic of art since the 1990s. He is the author of groundbreaking exhibitions and works—created on his own or in collaboration—such as the "Paradise Workshops," 1990, the pop culture "Characters to be reactivated" series, 1991–1997, or the collaborative projects of the 2000s that made him a seminal figure for the new generation of French artists. His approach successively deals with issues such as the permanence of things and the digital manipulation of reality, questions of knowledge and transmission, of how to produce forms, and how they evolve.