Jean-Michel Othoniel is the most celebrated artist working in glass today in France. He has made sculptures, performances, and architecture out of an unlikely material: glass beads. Using large blown spheres rather than tiny seed beads, he has demonstrated how beads may participate in the larger context of contemporary art. With his necklaces hanging from the ceiling of a gallery or entwined in trees or wound around fountains, Othoniel presents decoration on a grand scale, while promoting beaded strands as a vehicle for sculptural form. The White Necklace, which consists of 51 blown, irregularly shaped lattimo glass beads, is one of a series of necklaces that Othoniel has presented in gallery and museum exhibitions around the world. Monochromatic or candy-colored, the necklaces are simply hung as a strand or twisted into the shape of a lasso, a knot, or an abstract form. Othoniel’s necklaces are seductive and beautiful, and in his work, the body, though unseen, is always suggested. “Glass has a memory,” he says. “If you harm molten glass by cutting into it, the glass will heal by remelting. However, once cooled, a scar will appear.” Glass is thus an appropriate material, and metaphor, for an object originally conceived to caress the human skin. Othoniel has installed his necklaces in such diverse locations as the trees of the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, a fountain at the Alhambra in Granada, and the bamboo garden of the Villa Medici in Rome. His fantastic, chandelier-like metro station—titled Le Kiosque des noctambules (The kiosk of the sleepwalkers)—at the Palais Royal stop near the Louvre, has become a landmark in Paris. Unsigned. For more information, see Catherine Grenier, Othoniel, Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2010.