The French contemporary artist Pierre Huyghe’s first solo exhibition in a Swiss museum is billed as “a site-specific experience”. Huyghe, who lives in Santiago, Chile, is best known for his works that mix technologies with organic forms, pushing at the boundaries of what art can be. Most famously, his work at Documenta 13 in 2012 included piles of compost, towers of paving slabs, a replica of a 1930s Max Weber sculpture with a real beehive for a head and, most memorably, a white dog called Human that had one leg painted pink.
Visitors to the Fondation Beyeler are immersed in a series of mostly recent works that have been organised to be “a set of relations that continually reconfigure themselves, giving rise to new narratives”, according to the press release. Among the highlights are a new work titled Apnea (2026), which is an “artificial breathing organ” submerged in a glass water tank.
Huyghe’s latest film, Liminals (2025), features a faceless figure that shifts “states and attempts to exist in a realm outside time and space”, while in another video piece, Camata (2024), machines perform what appears to be a ritual on a skeleton in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The latter is “continuously re-edited in real time through sensors embedded in the exhibition space”.
• Pierre Huyghe, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, until 13 September
