“Exhibitions are rituals. The artist and the museum provide the stage; visitors animate it with all their senses”. For Pipilotti Rist, eyes and bodies can be cameras, an idea informing most of her art, a continuous exploration of the potential, conventions and limitations offered by evolving video technologies.
Pipilotti Rist was born in 1962 in Grabs, Switzerland. She lives and works in Zurich. Since the 1980s she has been recognized as a pioneering figure in the international art scene. From March 1 to June 23 2019 the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humblebaek, Denmark will host Rist’s first major retrospective.
Louisiana was the first museum to collect the artist’s work, and the UBS Art Collection was equally early, and prescient, in acquiring some of her early work. One of the works in the UBS Art Collection is the stunning ‛Flying Room‛. In it, an eclectic collection of furniture pieces, each turned upside down, hangs from the ceiling frozen in suspended motion.
The home is a recurring theme for the artist, the Louisiana exhibition draws the visitors in a succession of rooms, organized around artworks and furnished accordingly. “For a lot of people” the artist says “the Louisiana is a dream museum, a shared apartment where we visit friends and are allowed to look in every corner”.
Her daring and technologically advanced video installations might overwhelm with color, sound and motion, but ultimately bring viewers together in memorable sensory experiences. “I believe in the idea that the museum lifts us all in a common thought bubble. There we want to show knowledge and feelings. The minute someone is attracted and touched by a work of art, loneliness is overcome”.
Pipilotti Rist, Open My Glade will be open from 1 March to 23 June 2019 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek, Denmark. UBS supports the programs and exhibitions at the Louisiana.
