Jean-Michel Othoniel was born in 1964 in Saint-Étienne, France. In 1993, he began to introduce glass into his works and started to explore its artistic malleability through a series of transformations and mutations. The material has since become a signature of his works. Inventor of a universe of ultimate freedom, Othoniel presented his first retrospective, titled "My Way", at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2011, which has subsequently travelled to the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art/ Plateau in Seoul, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and the Macao Museum of Art in Macao, before reaching its final venue, the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2012. This year Othoniel will install a group of three majestic fountain sculptures, The Beautiful Dances, in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, which will be the first permanent work commissioned from a contemporary artist since King Louis XVI.