Rirkrit Tiravanija
October 20 - November 22, 2025 | Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled (the savage detectives) (or the chorus that includes, the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.), 2025
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s works have always defied notions of singular authorship, not only when they are shaped by the gathering of people, their agency and interactions. In his highly citational practice, art history is understood as something generative: by way of reenacting, making use of and copying existing artworks, both his own and by other artists, Tiravanija continues to destabilize the status of the discrete object and expand the capacities of the readymade (the readymade not merely as a physical object, but also as a formation of preconceived ideas and sets of practices that are readily available in society). Some of Tiravanija’s earliest works, as well as most recent ones, can be read as counter-motions to the commodification of life, critiquing the dichotomies that Western taxonomic knowledge systems have constructed: Nature/Culture, Human/non-human, Artwork/Artifact, Civilized/Savage.
Staring at a metal object on the gallery’s floor are two hairy figures, face to face, who seem to have escaped an ethnological diorama. Mimicking the Spider-Man posture of professional golfer Camilo Villegas, the life-sized sculpture portrays Rirkrit Tiravanija and artist friend Udomsak Krisanamis rendered as prehistoric creatures—almost human. Effigies have appeared in Tiravanija’s work before (infamously, he has even employed a doppelganger), while others of his self-portraits incorporate artifacts as proxies for the artist’s body, negotiating the meaning of its absence or presence. Lying between the two figures is a steel comb, an almost exact replica of the one Marcel Duchamp first conceived as an artwork at 11 a.m. on February 17, 1916. Art historians have debated the original purpose of this particular model, but what’s certain is that it was not designed to comb human hair.