Leviathan Monumenta Grand Palais Paris

Paris, France

Hightex was responsible for the engineering, production and erection of the artwork. The entire surface of the sculpture is made of a single piece of PVC-coated polyester membrane with a surface area of approx. 12.100m². The “walk-in” sculpture is approx. 100 meters long, 34 meters high and weighs 12 tons. It is an inflatable sculpture, clamped to the ground and entrance arch and in a Bordeaux-red colour specially chosen by the artist. Hightex installed the sculpture in only 8 days.

Each year MONUMENTA invites an internationally-renowned artist to turn his vision to the vast Nave of Paris’ Grand Palais and to create a new artwork especially for this space. MONUMENTA is an artistic creation on an unparalleled scale, filling a space with an area of 13,500 sqm and a height of 35m. Anish Kapoor’s ambition for the Grand Palais is to create an aesthetic and physical shock, a colourful experience that is poetic, meditative and stunning, measuring itself against the height and light of the Nave, an interior that seems somehow greater than the exterior.