Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art is pleased to present , which is its Black Box’s second media art project. As one of the most estimable imaging artists, Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist has been making video works since the second half of the 1980s. She began to attract attention in the art scene thorough her artistic endeavors that reminded one of music videos, commercial advertisements and movie trailers. Her renown as an eminent international artist was occasioned by her being chosen to show her work in the Swiss Pavilion at the 1994 Sao Paulo Biennial and her winning of the Premio 2000 Prize at the 1997 Venice Biennale. Since then, Rist has been leading an eye-opening artistic career: She has had his solo exhibitions in various places throughout the world including Centre Pompidou in Paris, Hara Museum in Tokyo, MoMA in New York and Hayward Gallery in London; she also was selected to represent Switzerland at 2005 Venice Biennale.
In the works of Rist, her artistic interest in the female body is embodied through her conventionally unrestrained provocative imagination. Her works spontaneously transverse the boundary between the illusory and the real due to her unapproachable orchestration of luminous and glaring color schemes, sensuous and enthralling images and music. Being with her entrancing works, one is invited to the ambit of contradictory emotions: light-mindedness and impishness and simultaneously melancholy and anxiety. Her coherent creative inquiries has targeted at powerful and potent visual effects and the human body: Her early works borrowed the forms of popular culture while combining music and psychedelic images for the ludicrous sarcasm on the fixed ideas and conventional images of women; her recent artistic concern is focused on spectacular video installations.
Spear to Heaven Occupying the entire space of the Black Box, Spear to Heaven shows the outside landscapes seen by the eye that travels inside the human body. It amply exemplifies the diagnostic characteristics of her art: an irreplaceable sense of color and a bemused and engrossing atmosphere. Four moving images, which are projected onto the translucent drapes installed throughout the black to transform it into a space of enchantment and fantasy and to allow one to enjoy a sense of unfettered freedom. Furthermore, the body of the viewer walking through the translucent tunnels is forcefully integrated into the artwork so that he or she is encouraged to become conscious of the unperceived aspects of his or her own body by appreciating it from a different perspective. This video installation of Pipilotti Rist shown at the Black Box undoubtedly deliver one an offbeat and refreshing experience of visual art to feel it not only with his or her eyes but with his or her ears and body as well.
