FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Pipilotti Rist
Herbstzeitlose
(Saffron Flower or Fall Time Less)
September 11 - October 23, 2004
Opening Reception: Friday, September 10th, 6 - 8pm
Luhring Augustine is pleased to present an exhibition by Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist. For her second solo exhibition with the gallery, Rist will premiere two new works.
Throughout her career Rist's work has been characterized by a unique mixture of rigor and exuberance. It has ranged widely across different media, though her most accomplished pieces are her large-scale video installations. Her work has the ability to engage and enamor the viewer. The color, the movement of the camera and the scale of her works are the vehicles for the creation of a dream space where she explores love, eroticism, the body, the senses, nature, and psychological and physical space. While often playful and entertaining, the work is simultaneously very personal, poetic and sociopolitical.
In the main gallery of this exhibition Rist will create a human scale installation called Herbstzeitlose (meadow saffron or fall time less); this work will continue her "interweaving of inside and outside, subjectivity and environment". The projections in the space will consist of footage shot in the countryside of her childhood home near St. Gallen, Switzerland. The point of entry into the installation is the backdoor of a typical Swiss country home, where the viewer is invited to sit at the table and take in the vista as well as move around the installation. The work invokes a dialogue between mortal and spiritual, which Rist then continues in the second gallery with a sculptural video work titled Grabstein für RW (Tomb Stone for RW). In her unique way, Rist confronts the notion of passing on from this life and commemorates it joyously.
Rist's recent projects have taken her to three continents; this past spring she opened Stir Heart, Rinse Heart: Pipilotti Rist at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as an exhibition of several major video installations at The Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland. This fall she will complete a commission of a permanent video installation for a bathroom in the new building of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan. Her work can be seen in numerous publications and in the collections of museums and institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Kunsthaus Zurich, the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Belgium and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art.
For further information please contact Natalia Mager at 212.206.9100 or natalia@luhringaugustine.com.
