Artists

Cyprien Gaillard

Press release

Désespoir des Singes is the first major exhibition in Denmark by French artist Cyprien Gaillard. It brings together a large, newly composed, selection of Polaroids photographed between 2006 and 2012, depicting buildings, monuments, ruins, parks, and landscapes at sites marked by ambition, transformation and decay. The images are presented on specially designed displays, suspended from the space's numerous pillars and held in curved formations by piano wire and clavichord tuning pegs. Arranged in groupings of nine, like crystallized facets, they connect places and moments across time and geography. The exhibition borrows its title from Araucaria araucana, a tree whose French name translates as "monkeys' despair". Taxonomic signs once attached to the same tree species, removed by the artist from various French botanical gardens, are installed in the exhibition using their original mountings. A corridor built into the exhibition space houses a bronze sculpture of a seated, weeping figure. Recurring in Gaillard's practice, it depicts the Buddha in a moment of despair – a motif widely circulated in Indonesia as both craft object and tourist souvenir. Furthering these questions of purpose and circulation, a series of sculptures is composed of different tropical timber, small blocks designated by size and shape as blanks for the production of knives and pens. Together, the works tie in with the artist's ongoing investigation into the entanglement of nature and culture, creation and destruction, as well as the shifting relationships between past and present. They trace how human movement and civilization leave material and visual residues across landscapes and objects. Cyprien Gaillard (b. 1980) lives in Paris and Berlin. His work has been shown in exhibitions at institutions worldwide, including Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2025—2026, OGR Torino & Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, and LUMA Arles, both in 2022, the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, in 2015, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, in 2015, MoMA PS1, New York, in 2013, the Kunsthalle Basel in 2010, MMK Frankfurt in 2010, the New Museum, New York, and Tate Modern, London, both in 2009. In 2010 Gaillard was the recipient of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, and in 2011 he was awarded the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art, Berlin. The exhibition is supported by New Carlsberg Foundation and presented in collaboration with Yonder, Art•Science, at the Niels Bohr Institute.