Happy Ending, Stockholm, Paris, 1996, 1997 (2014). The work can be regarded as an incarnation of previous works originating from his 1996 solo exhibition in Stockholm, Happy Ending. Here Parreno presented an original lamp designed by Eero Saarinen, that had been intended for an unrealized hotel that was supposed to have been built upon the exact location of the gallery. The lamp stood alone within the gallery space, lit but not visibly plugged into an electrical source. At the end of the exhibition the work disappeared.
The following year at his solo exhibition for the opening of the Air de Paris gallery in Paris, only works in glass were presented, each of them a clear reinterpretation of previous works that no longer existed. The gallery was located in a new building, one with no history, a rarity for Paris. As part of this show, Parreno produced a glass version of the Saarinnen lamp (an edition of three and two Artist Proofs) entitling them Happy Ending, Stockholm, 1996. During the exhibition, four of the five glass lamps were lost - either broken or stolen. Only one survived and remains in the design collection of the Fonds national d’art contemporain in France.
Now the lamps reappear once again. Happy Ending, Stockholm, Paris, 1996, 1997 is a series of ten transparent glass sculptures. In this, their most recent manifestation, each piece differs slightly from the other yet continues to directly evoke their erased predecessors. The themes of ghosts, apparitions and absences, and the effect of spaces upon that which they hold are a constant in Parreno’s work.