Sean Kelly is delighted to present Buried Sunshine, Julian Charrière’s highly anticipated first solo exhibition at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles. Buried Sunshine explores the entangled histories of Los Angeles and the discovery of petroleum there in the late 19th century, a catalyst which industrialized the region and transformed LA into the second largest city in the United States. Capturing the delirium of the petroleum industry and the burning of lithic landscapes, focused through the lens of Los Angeles—the world’s largest urban oil field—Charrière brings his film Controlled Burn together with sculptures and a new series of heliographic photographs, to unearth the ‘fossilized sunshine’ upon which the mythos of the city was built. Examining the material reality of hydrocarbons and how our modern world is organized around the energy they provide, the exhibition draws parallels between the image-making machine of Hollywood and our dependence on fossil fuels, both of which exert gravitational forces that bend our perceptions of reality.

“Like science fiction, art can provide a speculative window into other times; other worlds.” - Julian Charrière

“There are many similarities between science and art: The most important for me is the fact that both science and art believe in nothing, but are tirelessly in doubt, trying to make sense of what surrounds us and thus act as engines of change and constantly reinvent reality.” - Julian Charrière

“Photography is not neutral: every image has a shadow. Every digital image made today exists as a negative in the form of fossil fuel being burned somewhere; of the flash of electricity needed to generate them.” - Julian Charrière

As an exhibition, Buried Sunshine expands on Julian Charrière’s ongoing inquiry into how our species inhabits the world, and how it in turn inhabits us. Charrière combines Los Angeles’s unique industrial history with the iconic image-making for which the city is famous, creating an immersive landscape where our most urgent ecological concerns can be addressed. Utilizing photography, film and sculpture, Buried Sunshine investigates Los Angeles through the lens of geological time, in the process urging viewers to reflect on how our relationship with the materials we appropriate as fuel come to inform how we perceive the world around us.

Julian Charrière was born in Morges, Switzerland, in 1987 and currently lives and works in Berlin. His work has been the subject of solo presentations at major international institutions, including SFMOMA, San Francisco; Langen Foundation, Neuss; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; MAMbo, Bologna; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Parasol Unit Foundation, London; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; and Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris. Charrière has also been prominently featured at the 59th Biennale di Venezia; 57th Biennale di Venezia; the Antarctic Biennale; the Taipei Biennial; the 12th and 16th Biennale de Lyon; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus; SCHIRN Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Julian Charrière is a former participant of the Institute for Spatial Experiments, an experimental education and research project at the Berlin University of the Arts led by Olafur Eliasson. A nominee for the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2021, Charrière in 2022 received the 14th SAM Prize for Contemporary Art.

The publication Julian Charrière: Controlled Burn documents his solo exhibition curated by Dehlia Hannah and Nadim Samman, which was on view at the Langen Foundation in Neuss, Germany from September 4, 2022 - August 6, 2023. A meditation on the flame as a figure of excess, containment, and renewal for our warming planet, it features essays by Emanuele Coccia, Dehlia Hannah, and Nadim Samman. It is published by Mousse Publishing.

For additional information on Julian Charrière, please visit skny.com and julian-charriere.net

For media inquiries, please email Brandon Tho Harris at Brandon@skny.com

For all other inquiries, please email Thomas Kelly at Thomas@seankellyla.com or Lauren Kelly at Lauren@skny.com