Time Travel

Known for installations exploring science, natural phenomena, and contemporary mythologies, French artist Laurent Grasso presents a visual journey of his avant-garde, conceptual work.

Drawing on the visual possibilities of electromagnetic energy, radio waves, and natural phenomena, French conceptual artist Laurent Grasso explores their effect on our perception via immersive videos, sculptures, paintings, and drawings that resort to images or techniques borrowed from cinema or art history. At the crossroads of heterogeneous temporalities, geographies, and realities, his installations play with shifting viewpoints, boundaries between fiction and reality, and unusual perspectives.

This tome explores the artist’s manipulations of what we perceive to be time’s consistency, showcasing artworks merging a wide range of interests, including scientific speculations and fictions; natural catastrophes; and representations of power and authority. This questioning of time appears in Grasso’s Studies into the Past paintings, created using historically accurate techniques, which reconstruct our perception of the reality of another era to create a “false historical memory.” Vibrant photographs display his unique pieces, while astute observations from some of the world’s foremost art critics offer insight into Grasso’s approach.

Laurent Grasso is a French artist. He won the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2008 and was awarded the esteemed Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture in 2015. He is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery in New York and Galerie Perrotin in Paris.

Laurence des Cars is the president and director of the Louvre.

Denise Markonish is the senior curator and managing director of visual arts at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA).

Arnauld Pierre is an art historian, critic, and professor at Paris–Sorbonne University.