Pierre Huyghe

Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962, Paris) is one of the most influential artists of his generation. He is known for his boundary-dissolving works, in which fiction and reality seamlessly merge. 

Timekeeper is part of a project that Huyghe began in 1999 with a site-specific wall installation for his solo show «Le procès du temps libre» at the Vienna Secession. For this work, he sanded down a circular, eye-level section of white gallery wall to uncover the layers of paint left by previous exhibitions. The concentric rings call to mind the growth rings in a tree: while the outermost layers reveal more recent exhibitions, the layers exposed at the centre reach further back into the past. The wall thus becomes a material portrait of the institution and its history.

For Timekeeper (2026), Huyghe removed a fragment of wall from the building fabric of the Fondation Beyeler and continued the work series in a new context. The exposed strata render visible the chronological painting of the exhibition space and reveal architecture as a vessel of memory. The work understands time not as a linear sequence, but as something that inscribes itself in material and space.

Architectural intervention, succession of exhibition layers / plasterboard, wood

55 x 4.7 cm

Copyright: Pierre Huyghe

Provenance: donated by the artist