PIPILOTTI RIST
PRICKLING GOOSEBUMPS & A HUMMING HORIZON
9 November 2023 – 6 April 2024
NEW YORK, 22ND STREET
Self-described ‘wild and friendly’ Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist presents a selection of new and recent sculptural works and projections in ‘Prickling Goosebumps & a Humming Horizon,’ a major two-part exhibition opening in Chelsea. The exhibition takes place simultaneously at Hauser & Wirth’s 22nd Street location and Luhring Augustine’s 24th Street location and has been conceived by the artist as a multisensory experience for visitors. In these complementary presentations, Rist will explore interior and exterior—internal and external physical and psychological spaces—with Luhring Augustine reimagined as an expansive, shared ‘backyard’ and Hauser & Wirth transformed into a whimsical ‘collective living room.’
At each location visitors will be greeted with an artistic gesture on the façade: the work ‘Textile Simultaneity’ at Luhring Augustine and ‘Innocent Collection’ at Hauser & Wirth.
About the exhibition
At Hauser & Wirth’s West 22nd Street building, Rist transforms the entire street level space into a ‘living room’ painted in lush reds and vegetal greens. Here guests discover single-channel sculptural video works, including many presented publicly for the first time.
For each of these works, Rist has embedded a video into a found domestic object or piece of furniture—from ‘Ich brenne für dich (I burn for you)’ (2018), fashioned from an antique marble fireplace mantle to ‘Über Stock und Stein (Over Hill and Dale)’ (2023), which animates the interior of a vintage toy horse stable with different oscillating forms and colors. A new group of sculptures, together titled ‘Metal Flake Milk Tooth’ (2023), punctuates the space in an arrangement laying low across the gallery floor.
Two new major video projections—‘Welling Color Island East’ (2023) and ‘Welling Color Island West’ (2023)—and the new moving light installation ‘Petting Colors’ (2023) complete Rist’s interior adventure at Hauser & Wirth. Her richly colored projections swirl down from the ceiling onto carpet ‘islands’ occupied by cushioned seating areas for communal occupancy and immersion. The gently moving lights of ‘Petting Colors’ dance across the room to land upon visitors and connect them to one another as well as Rist’s other works in situ, making members of the public active participants in her enchantments.
With their furniture-like qualities—each form evokes yet subverts the familiar geometries of a chair or coffee table— these objects hew to Rist’s longstanding fascination with the reflective and emotive potentials of light: constructed from fiberglass composite, the sculptures have been coated with metal flakes, airbrushed candy colors and clear lacquer that yield glittery, optically dynamic surfaces which defy capture by photography.
The Innocent Collection
1985 - approx. 2032
On View at New York, 22nd Street
‘Prickling Goosebumps & a Humming Horizon’ is on view until 13 January 2024.
About the Artist
Pipilotti Rist
Pipilotti Rist, a pioneer of spatial video art, was born 1962 in Grabs in the Swiss Rhine Valley on the Austrian Border and has been a central figure within the international art scene since the mid-1980s.
Astounding the art world with the energetic exorcistic statement of her now famous single channel videos, such as ‘I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much,’ 1986 and ‘Pickelporno,’ 1992, her artistic work has co-developed with technical advancements and in playful exploration of its new possibilities to propose footage resembling a collective brain. Through large video projections and digital manipulation, she has developed immersive installations that draw life from slow caressing showers of vivid color tones, like her works ‘Sip My Ocean,’ 1996 or ‘Worry Will Vanish,’ 2014.
For Rist, showing vulnerability is a sign of strength on which she draws for inspiration. With her curious and lavish recordings of nature (to which humans belong as an animal), and her investigative editing, Rist seeks to justify the privileged position we are born with, simply by being human. Her installations and exhibition concepts are expansive, finding within the mind, senses and body the possibility for endless discovery and poetical invention. ‘Pixel Forest,’ 2016, made from 3,000 thousand LEDs hung on strings, resembles a movie screen that has exploded into the room, allowing viewers an immersive walk through 3-dimensional video. As she herself puts it, ‘beside the energy-intensive exploration of the geographical world, pictures, films and sounds have been and are the spaces into which we can escape... The projector is the flamethrower, the space is the vortex and you are the pearl within.’
Since 1984, Rist has had countless solo and group exhibitions, and video screenings worldwide. Her recent solo exhibitions are 'Electric Idyll' at the Fire Station Doha (2024), 'Prickling Goosebumps & A Humming Horizon' at Hauser & Wirth New York and Luhring Augustine Chelsea (2023-24), 'Behind Your Eyelid' at Tai Kwun Hong Kong (2022), ‘Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor’ at The Geffen Contemporary, MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2021 – 2022), ‘Your Eye Is My Island’ at MoMAK, The National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto and ART TOWER MITO (2021). ‘Åbn min Lysning. Open my Glade’ at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Humlebæk Denmark (2019), ‘Sip My Ocean’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney (2017 – 2018), ‘Pixel Forest’ at New Museum New York (2016 – 2017) and ‘Your Saliva is My Diving Suit of the Ocean of Pain’ at Kunsthaus Zürich (2016), all resulted in record-breaking attendance numbers for each institution. A major exhibition is planned for summer 2025 at UCCA Beijing.
Current Exhibitions
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