An important and seminal series within Philippe Parreno’s pioneering career, Marquee works have been shown and housed in some of the world’s most important institutions. Marquee 2016 (now in Tate’s collects ion) was the centrepiece of his Turbine Hall commission Anywhen at London’s Tate Modern, and in 2019, Parreno was commissioned to create a Marquee for the new lobby of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Works from the series are also in the permanent collects ions of Centre Georges Pompidou and housed in some of the most important private collects ions, such as Fondation Beyeler and Pinault collects ion. Executed in 2015, Marquee M1535 is a large-scale example of Parreno’s celebrated series. Begun in 2006, Parreno’s luminous sculptures are inspired by the signs which hung over entrances of American cinemas in the 1950s. Designed to hang over a doorway or from the ceiling, the present work is composed of a transparent plexiglass body measuring over three meters in length and over one meter in depth, making it an effectively life-size marquee. Suspended from above, the lightbulbs and neon lights bathe the surrounding walls, viewers, and space in its warm glow. Marking the moments of buzzing anticipation upon entering a movie theatre and the lively discussions as crowds leave, the beaming lights of the marquees are portals to a different reality – a place where the passage of t.mes is altered and confines of reality are broken, and a place which promises infinite narrative potential. Soaking under the light of Marquee M1535, the nebulous realm of reality and the imagined is blurred, and its presence at once transforms the space into a site of endless possibilities.

Interdisciplinary and collaborative in his approach, Parreno rose to prominence in the 1990s as part of an experimental group of European artists and curators such as Liam Gillick, Pierre Huyghe and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Central to his practice is the notion of exhibition as medium, and Parreno utilises a range of media such as radio, television, cinema and information technology to orchestrate an experience. The marquee form was borne from Parrreno’s observation that longer descriptive texts in museum labels correlated with more t.mes spent in front of the artwork. Experimenting with label-as-artwork, theatre marquees, as an ultimate, three-dimensional, flashing label, came into form. In his words, "art is filled with things that aren't so much objects but quasi-objects. [They are] objects whose existence is dependent on their context" (Phillippe Parreno quoted in: Stuart Jeffries, “Philippe Parreno: timing is everything,” The Guardian, 15 November 2010, online). Radiant in its physical beauty, the quasi-marquee is an intervention device which introduces possibilities and situations. It expands the perception of duration, exploring the borders between reality and its representation.