For Art Basel Unlimited, 2017, Philippe Parreno presents the final and most elaborate sculpture in his series Fraught Times (2008-2017).

Pilar Corrias presents this important work during a career-defining moment for the artist, ahead of major upcoming exhibitions at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, the Museo Jumex, Mexico City and the Museum Martin Gropius-Bau, Berlin. Tate have also just made a major acquisition of another seminal work by Parreno after his Turbine Hall commission earlier this year.

Following on from a highly ambitious installation for the 57th Venice Biennale – Parreno’s seventh appearance at the Venice Biennale - this extraordinary new sculpture is among the artist’s most major works, on a scale unlike any other before. This piece has been four years in the making and is a true masterpiece within Parreno’s oeuvre.

This presentation at Art Basel follows a number of major solo exhibitions in recent years including those at Tate Modern, London (2017), Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2017), Park Avenue Armory, New York (2015), Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2015) the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013) and more.

In Fraught Times: For Eleven Months of the Year It’s an Artwork and in December It’s Christmas (July) (2017) Parreno has produced the most hyperreal work from the series, physically retaining the delicacy of the pine needles of a real tree on the grandest scale to date. Over 100 decorations adorn this tree making it completely different in design from the others.

As an uncanny copy of the real, the work disrupts our expectations and belies our understanding of nature. With a nearly incomprehensible verisimilitude, the presence of the work is almost overpowering, providing every sense that the object is alive and real, despite being entirely manmade.

The series – 11 cast stainless steel trees in total – began in 2008 for the inaugural exhibition of Pilar Corrias Gallery. The exhibition presented the first of Parreno’s large scale, painted, cast stainless steel sculptures of decorated Christmas trees. Playing with the length of time we engage with an object and with the concepts of celebration and desire, the Christmas tree marked the event of the opening of a new gallery and was the only work to occupy the entire space.

Parreno’s work is known for challenging viewers by questioning authorship and perceptions of reality and illusion, epitomised in the series Fraught Times, which Parreno has continued to work on for the past decade. In this piece, Parreno pushes our perceptions of an artwork to the point of paradox, affirming both its transient nature and its correlation with other factors in constant evolution.

Fraught Times highlights the relationship between an object and its viewer who bestows its meaning, which changes according to a specific spatial, temporal, or situational contexts.

As Parreno writes, "this generic, colourful Christmas Tree is one of the kind that you can find in Buddhist countries. It has got nothing to do with the religious event. Instead it is a time marker, a decorative object. A fragment of an urban landscape, a feeling of suburbia, that mimics this weird plant that grows in the winter and dies in January.”

In this work Parreno is considering the elusiveness of time and the way people attempt to grasp or mark time through their relationship with materials and objects. In doing so, he develops a unique method of dealing with the temporal without actually using more contemporary time-based media. Instead Parreno opts for a complex and monumental sculpture whose materiality is static and heavy, yet its associated meanings are undoubtedly governed by human perceptions of passing time and sentimentality.