The Wall House Museum presents an exceptional exhibition dedicated to Jean-Michel Othoniel, one of the most internationally acclaimed French artists, renowned for his poetic works combining glass, light, and architecture.
Born in 1964, Jean-Michel Othoniel became known in the 1990s for his innovative use of blown glass, often in collaboration with the master glassmakers of Murano. His creations, which straddle the intimate and the monumental, are featured in major public and private collections, including the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in front of the Louvre, where he created the famous Palais-Royal Metro Entrance – Kiosque des Noctambules.
After a particularly active year that saw him exhibit his works all over the world, from Montauban to Shanghai, from Brazil to Cannes, and including his incredible summer in Avignon, where he took the City of the Popes by storm in a dozen locations, Jean-Michel Othoniel will set up camp in Saint Barthélemy for an exhibition that will mark a milestone in the history of our island and offer a rare opportunity to rediscover the artist's dialogue between art, nature, and spirituality, through a journey designed as a sensory and luminous stroll.
Entitled Beauty Saves the World, this exhibition brings together some twenty largely unseen and emblematic works, exploring themes dear to the artist: transformation, fragility, and the beauty of the world. Through glass and stainless-steel sculptures, suspended installations, and lithographs, Othoniel offers an immersion in a universe that is both sensual and meditative.
"Since my first stay in Saint-Barth, I have been struck by the beauty of the island, the power of the vegetation and the cosmos. In the title of this exhibition, there is a statement "beauty saves the world." Here, I reveal different aspects of my work and pay homage to this telluric beauty that inhabits the island, to the importance of nature and flowers, which are for me one of the important sources of inspiration. It is also a tribute to the beauty of the sun, this gold that warms us and is offered to us all, to the mathematical beauty of the sky and its stars that submerge us at night. I had already evoked the constellations in the work permanently installed in front of the Cheval Blanc hotel in Saint-Barth, a sculpture where we find the stars of Pegasus and the dynamics of the planets. There is this same cosmic energy in my infinite knots with multiple reflections.
I'm happy to return to Saint Barthélemy, to stay longer, thanks to the welcome I received, and to soak up the beauty that surrounds us for new works to come."
Jean-Michel Othoniel, October 2025