HUMPTY \ DUMPTY

Exhibition from 19 Oct 2022

Curator: Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel

Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation Galeries Lafayette
9, rue du Plâtre F-75004 Paris

HUMPTY \ DUMPTY is a new project by Cyprien Gaillard: an exhibition in two chapters, presented at the same time at Lafayette Anticipations and the Palais de Tokyo.

At Lafayette Anticipations, Cyprien Gaillard is giving new life to a work that has fallen into oblivion. A monumental sculpture installed since 1979 in the heart of Paris, Jacques Monestier's automaton Le Défenseur du Temps, a unique clock, consists of a man perched on a rock carrying a sword and a shield. The last movements of the automaton took place in 2003, and it has since been abandoned to the effects of time, against which it was trying to protect us.

For this exhibition, Cyprien Gaillard is working on its rebirth. The restoration of the automaton, at the centre of an opera in which it is the main actor, is put into perspective with the impossible return of the in perspective with the impossible return of a friend of the of the artist, who disappeared a few years earlier.

At the end of the exhibition, Le Défenseur du Temps will be reinstalled, renovated, in its original location.

Inspired by the times, when Paris was frantically restoring its most prestigious monuments and Gaillard reveals how the city is a privileged terrain for the expression of disorder, and how humans try to fight against these traces.

It is in the margins, the nooks and crannies, and the spaces of dissidence that the artist probes our desires for order and permanence and finds the narratives of possible new balances.

At the Palais de Tokyo, HUMPTYDUMPTY brings together a selection of works that have never been shown before in France, as well as those of guest artists. Through the relationship between the body and architecture, abandoned territories, evocations of war and invasive species, Gaillard paints a portrait of our link to collapse and reconstruction. The obsession with the preservation of beings and the conservation of things, and the permanent temptation to maintain or regain a certain order in the world, are revealed.

In parternship with Libération, Télérama, M Le Magazine du Monde, Trax, Time Out, Radio Nova and The New York Times.