Initially installed in 2015, La Rose des Vents was officially donated to San Francisco in March 2021 and dedicated in September 2022.
La Rose des Vents is a monumental work of public art in front of the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Created by renowned French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel. Among his many credits, Othoniel is the artist to have a permanent installation on the grounds of Versailles in over 300 years. The gilded, kinetic sculpture now belongs to the city’s Civic Art Collection as a gift from 836M.
836M is grateful to the San Francisco Arts Commission and the Department of Recreation and Parks for their support of the donation.
The dedication ceremony, free and open to all, began with representatives from several divisions of city government in attendance, including Recreation and Parks, Public Works, the Arts Commission, and the Cultural Districts Program. Othoniel and the Consul General of France in San Francisco presided at the dedication event.
ABOUT JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL
Jean-Michel Othoniel lives and works in Paris, and holds the distinction of being the first artist to have a permanent installation on the grounds of Versailles in over 300 years. He began working with glass in the early 1990s after being introduced to some of the finest glassmakers in Murano, Italy. From 1996, he began creating artworks for specific places – hanging giant necklaces in the gardens around the Villa Medici in Rome and from trees in the gardens of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. In 2000, he received an invitation to transform a Paris subway station into a double crown of glass and aluminum for his work, Le Kiosque des Noctambules. In later works for the “Crystal Palace” exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris and MoCA in Miami, Othoniel made blown-glass enigmatic sculptures that resembled jewelry, architecture, and gigantic erotic objects. By 2004, he exhibited his freestanding glass necklaces at the Louvre Museum. In 2011, the Centre Pompidou in Paris mounted a retrospective of Othoniel’s work, which subsequently traveled to the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art/Plateau in Seoul, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Macao Museum of Art in China and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Jean-Michel Othoniel is represented by Galerie Perrotin in Paris.
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