Philippe Parreno (French, b.1964) is an artist who works in a wide range of media, including film, sculpture, performance, drawing, and text. Born in Oran, Algeria, he graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts de Grenoble, and from the Institut des Hautes Etudes en arts plastiques at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. First rising to prominence in the early 1990s, Parreno has developed a practice that examines the concept of the exhibition, treating it as a whole rather than as a series of individual works. This practice enables the artist to analyze the systems of representation and the ways in which these systems are used to produce meaning. In doing so, Parreno also encourages viewers to examine concepts of time, memory, and reality.

Parreno’s multidisciplinary practice has led to collaborations with a number of other well-known artists. Throughout the late 1990s, Parreno collaborated with Conceptual artist Pierre Huyghe on projects such as the incomplete film script L’Histoire d’un sentiment, a fake magazine entitled Anna Sanders. Speech Bubbles, and the Japanese manga cartoon character Annlee, featured in the exhibition No Ghost Just a Shell. He has also collaborated with Liam Gillick, Carsten Höller, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, among others.

He has also had success in solo shows, including the 2013 exhibition Anywhere, Anywhere Out Of The World, which transformed the Palais de Tokyo using sound, images, and performance to guide the viewer through the space. In 2015, Parreno held his first major exhibition in the United States, H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS, which debuted at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. Much like his previous shows, the exhibition juxtaposed film, sculpture, sound, and light. Other solo shows include Let’s Entertain at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Big Nothing at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and theanyspacewhatever at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Parreno currently lives and works in Paris.