Whale Song, 2024

Jean-Marie Appriou

Aluminum

Acclaimed international artist Jean-Marie Appriou brings three sculptures, Hommage, A Long Journey, and The Gate of the Whales to Boston’s Central Wharf Park to create Whale Song. In Whale Song, the artist’s historical and mystical perspectives on whales invite the public into a conversation about how the natural world has shaped us and vice versa. Hommage, representing the “historical whale,” speaks to the fact that we must reckon with a past of misusing natural resources to imagine a future that respects and preserves the natural world. The second work, A Long Journey, represents the “mythological whale,” the whale before humankind, and symbolizes the fact that every living being comes from the sea. The third piece, The Gate of the Whales, made up of representations of different species of whales, is a portal into a whale’s perception.

Embedded in Whale Song is not only a response to the impact of 19th-century whaling on the natural world but also a mythological rendering of the whale imagined by the artist as a reminder of our shared environment. Whale Song offers passersby a change of perspective as they reflect on the past, present, and future of these magnificent creatures and their significance in our world.

Images courtesy of Perrotin

visit

Whale Song is on view at Central Wharf Park across from the New England Aquarium at 250 Atlantic Ave, Boston, MA.

The closest MBTA Stop is the Aquarium stop on the Blue Line.

About the Artist

It is with remarkable technical skill that Jean-Marie Appriou takes control of sculptural materials—aluminum, bronze, glass, clay, wax—to envisage fantastical worlds inhabited by human, animal and vegetal figures. Through their skillfully constructed scale, his often imposing works nevertheless maintain an intimate relationship with the viewer, as if to better communicate their disturbing strangeness. Deeply dreamlike, Appriou’s material universe is imbued with telluric concerns approached from an original perspective: that of the legendary. Horses, snakes, locusts, sharks and seahorses compose a bestiary charged with powerful symbolism. They evolve in a dream realm, a marvelous natural world that becomes a theater of striking characters. Sowers, gatherers, beekeepers and Japanese Ama divers—all represent figures of passage and transformation. The transition between elements—from the aquatic to the aerial, from the underground to the terrestrial—is one of the central themes of the artist’s work. From archaic ages to futuristic civilizations, between dinosaurs and child astronauts, Appriou produces visions on the edge of psychedelia, mixing pop culture and mythologies from Greek and Egyptian antiquity to science fiction. His sculpture combines the allegorical and the sensual, leaving his fingerprints visible on the material. He weaves a paradoxical narrative that unites the past and the future, the ideal and the perceptible, in a series of hallucinatory ecstasies.

Appriou’s work has been exhibited at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Musée du Louvre, Paris; the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles; the Musée des Abattoirs, Toulouse; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Consortium Museum, Dijon; The Villa Medici, Roma, the Biennale de Lyon and the 7th Jing’an International Sculpture Project, Shanghai. He was invited by the Public Art Fund to present a group of sculptures at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza at the southeast entrance to Central Park in New York, at the Château de Versailles and at the Vienna Biennale. In 2023, he was chosen by Donatien Grau to engrave a copper plate and produce an etching, La Constellation du Louvre, 2023 that entered the Musée du Louvre collection. His works have been the subject of solo gallery exhibitions at Perrotin, Shanghai; Jan Kaps, Cologne; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Vienna and New York; Kaikai Kiki, Tokyo; C L E A R I N G, New York, Brussels and Los Angeles and MASSIMODECARLO, London and Hong Kong.

local Curation and perspective

Whale Song is Now + There’s fifth collaboration with guest curator Pedro Alonzo, who has previously brought us Oscar Tuazon’s Growth Rings in 2019, Jose Davila’s To Each Era Its Art. To Art, Its Freedom in 2020, Claudia Comte’s Five Marble Leaves in 2022 and most recently, Edra Soto’s Graft in 2023.

Pedro Alonzo is a Boston-based independent curator. He is currently an Adjunct Curator at Dallas Contemporary. Since 2006 he has specialized in producing exhibitions that transcend the boundaries of museum walls and spill out into the urban landscape, addressing audiences beyond the traditional museum public. In 2017 he formalized his practice by establishing A&C. At the ICA Boston, he curated Shepard Fairey’s 20-year survey, Supply, and Demand. For the MCA San Diego, he organized the group exhibition Viva la Revolución: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape, which featured site-specific works inside the museum and throughout downtown San Diego. In 2015 Alonzo began to develop exhibitions designed to engage the public, starting with a citywide exhibition in Philadelphia, Open Source: Engaging Audiences in Public Space, followed by working with JR to place a gigantic image of a Mexican child named Kikito, overlooking the US/México border wall in Tecate. Since 2016 Alonzo has worked with The Trustees, Massachusetts’s largest conservation and preservation non-profit, to launch and curate the organization’s first Art and the Landscape initiative, resulting in site-specific commissions created by the artists: Sam Durant (2016), Jeppe Hein (2016), Alicja Kwade (2018), and Doug Aitken (2019).

The latest projects he developed at Dallas Contemporary are a major exhibition that brought together rarely-seen works by Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara in 2021, and a Shepard Fairey, Backward Forward in 2022. He is currently working on Amnesia Atómica, an ongoing project by Pedro Reyes, commissioned by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, centered on reviving and reintroducing the issue of nuclear threat into the public narrative.

public art = team work

Special thanks to BRM Production Management for helping N+T, Appriou, and Alonzo bring this project to life!

About Central Wharf Park

Designed by Reed Hilderbrand, a Cambridge-based landscape architecture practice, Central Wharf Park is an urban micro-forest composed of 24 mature oak trees and sits between the New England Aquarium and the Rose Kennedy Greenway at 250 Atlantic Avenue in Downtown Boston. The park has ramped entry points as well as step up curb entries and is paved in cobblestones. The artwork is sited throughout the park.