Pierre Huyghe For Metropolitan Museum Of Art’s Next Rooftop Installation

After creating a beguiling environment at Documenta 13, and a retrospective first at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, not to mention narrowly missing out to Albainian/French artist Anri Sala, as runner up, in Artlyst’s opinion, at the 2014 Vincent Award at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague; now the French conceptual artist Pierre Huyghe has been chosen for the next rooftop installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York.

Sheena Wagstaff, the chairwoman of the Metropolitan Museum’s modern and contemporary art department, and Ian Alteveer, a Met associate curator, have asked the artist to create a site-specific installation for the roof of the Met next spring. “His work is so captivating, and the way he thinks about the layers of a site, taking into account history, environment and science is so compelling, we thought he’d create something particularly interesting,” Mr. Alteveer said.

While the dates are set at the Met, his installation is to be on view from April 28 through Nov. 1, the ‘nature’ of the work itself is a mystery. “He’s still working on it,” Mr. Alteveer said, revealing only that “it will be an installation with a film component.”

Huyghe has long created fascinating environments for the viewer to immerse themselves in. At the Venice Biennale in 2001, he created three rooms about music, sound and light. One contained an eight-minute film of two tower blocks typical of the French housing projects that sprang up in the 1970s. Against a background of fog, windows light up and go dark in interludes marked by changes in the atmosphere.

At the Wollman skating rink in Central Park in 2005, the artist made a glacial landscape that was the setting for “A Journey That Wasn’t,” a musical film based on a trip to Antarctica; and more recently, Huyghe has created a fog-filled arboretum in Sydney and an ever-blooming garden in a crystal palace in Madrid. Perhaps one hint about his project at the Met that Mr. Alteveer let slip: “Pierre loves the fact that the park is full of animals.”

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