Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor by Pipilotti Rist

Our long-term collaboration with Zürich-based artist Pipilotti Rist, brought Kvadrat to proudly support her debuts at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) with Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor exhibition. Throughout the exhibition, Rist´s early works dating to the mid-1980s are presented, along with large-scale expanded videos and immersive installations.

Rist´s audio-video installations are absorptive and explore the possibilities of the video medium in representing the relationship between body and technology, interior as well as exterior landscape, highlighting how the interior psychology and dreams are equally important as the visible world. In her work, Rist focuses on creating sharable and common experiences that merge into the museum´s public space.

Both the installations and sculptural objects in Pipilotti Rist exhibition allows the guests to immerse themselves in unconventional environments, that change the perception of the distance between body and technology: while sitting on oversized living room furniture in Dans Zimmer (1994), walking through  the Pixel Forest (2016) made of thousands of coloured and bursting lights, or entering a surreal and dreamlike domestic environment, The Apartment;

 

^{Installation view of Pipilotti Rist: Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor, September 12, 2021–June 6, 2022 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo by Zak Kelley.}

Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist was born in 1962 in Grabs, Switzerland. She lives and works in Zürich. The artist was called Lotti (her full name is Elisabeth Charlotte) and added Pipi to Lotti the day she started in 1982 at the Universität für angewandte Kunst in Vienna, where she studied graphic design and animation and began making Super-8 films.

Alongside her studies she created stage designs or ‘visuals’ for various bands. In 1988-94 she was a member of the band ‘Les Reines Prochaines’. Since the end of the 1980s Rist has had a wide-ranging international exhibition practice and stands as a significant figure and pioneer on the contemporary art scene with her many-faceted works.

Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented internationally at venues including Louisiana, Denmark (2019); MCS, Australia (2017); New Museum, United States (2016); Kunsthaus Zürich (2016); Kunsthalle Krems, Austria (2015); Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (2013); Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea (2012); Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2011); the Hayward Gallery, London (2011); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2011); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2009); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2007); and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX (2006); among many others. Rist was awarded the Harper’s Bazaar Art China Prize (2013), the Zurich Festival Prize (2013), and the Joan Miró Prize (2009).