Jean-Marie Appriou: Cosmic Clock

Beneath the circular dome of the TANK Shanghai, Jean-Marie Appriou unfolds Cosmic Clock as a vast respiration of matter and time.The exhibition takes the form of a living cycle—an astral clock in which each sculpture becomes a sign, a rhythm, a pulse of the universe.Within the monumental shell of a former oil tank—an architecture born from transformation and flow—Appriou orchestrates a passage between biology and astronomy, mythology and alchemy, East and West.

Shaped in aluminum, bronze, and blown glass, his sculptures seem to emerge from a world in metamorphosis.They hover between the vegetal and the mineral, the human and the animal, the terrestrial and the celestial.
Each form breathes, as if animated by the slow memory of the elements. In Cosmic Clock, Appriou reinvents the zodiac as a universal language—a map of correspondences between forms, elements, and times.

The TANK Shanghai becomes a celestial observatory, an immense living clock where civilizations converse, where myth speaks through metal, and where sculpture becomes the breath of the cosmos.

“L’œuvre d’Appriou ne cherche pas à figer la matière : elle la pense, la rêve, la fait se souvenir d’elle-même.Elle révèle la conscience de la forme dans le devenir du monde.”
— Donatien Grau