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Close to the museum, on the esplanade of the Park Dräi Eechelen, opposite the Ville Haute, Mudam will present the iconic artwork The Living Pyramid (2015) by Hungarian-American artist Agnes Denes (1931, Budapest), a pioneering figure of ecological and environmental art. Conceived as a monumental sculpture with a natural life cycle, The Living Pyramid takes the form of a nine-metre- high pyramid on which grow more than two thousand flowering plants selected by the artist from local flora. Denes originally created this work for the Socrates Sculpture Park in New York and has since reproduced it on several occasions,including documenta 14, held in Kassel, Germany in 2017. For this new presentation, The Living Pyramid is augmented by an audience participation project, also imagined by Denes.
In the months leading up to the installation, participants are invited to complete a questionnaire on the meaning of life. Their responses will be gathered in a time capsule, which will be buried near the pyramid and opened in a thousand years.
Biography
Agnes Denes (1931, Budapest) has had solo exhibitions at the Shed, New York (2020); the Santa Monica Museum of Art (2012); the Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2008); the Chelsea Museum, New York (2004); the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art – Cornell University, Ithaca (1992); Kunsthalle Nürnberg (1982) and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1979). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno (2021); the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2020); Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (2019); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2018); Centre Pompidou-Metz (2016); the Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (2014); the Art Institute of Chicago (2011) and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2009). Works by Denes are included in the collections of institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago; Frac Lorraine, Metz; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; SFMOMA, San Francisco and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Agnes Denes lives and works in New York.