The Spring at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art begins with a blast full of colors, immersive images and sensuous dreamscapes. With the first major presentation in Scandinavia of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, the exhibition in the museum’s South Wing presents the work of one of visual art’s most conspicuous researchers of the senses in moving pictures.
Pipilotti Rist is a Swiss contemporary video artist who is best known for her vividly colorful work exploring the female body—namely her own. Rist’s work engages in lighthearted play, frequently combining a camera-specific aesthetic and technique with a message of social critique or commentary. “When I close my eyes, my imagination roams free,” she has explained.
Related: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Explores, challenges and explodes her potentials
Born Elizabeth Rist in 1962 in Rheintal, Switzerland, Pipilotti Rist combined her childhood nickname, Lotti, with the first name of the Swedish children’s story character Pippi Longstocking to create her artistic moniker in 1982. She attended the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna from 1982 to 1986 and the Schule für Gestaltung Basel from 1986 to 1988.
Since the middle of the 1980s Pipilotti Rist has continuously explored, challenged and exploded the potentials, rules, conventions and limitations of a constantly evolving palette of video technologies. In her works, video is not just video, but also painting and space.
Related: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Rethinking the video medium
“In the same way I want to create spaces for video art that rethink the very nature of the medium itself, I want to discover new ways of configuring the world, both the world outside and the world within,” she says.
Watch the video: Pipilotti Rist, Pioneer of Video Art | Brilliant Ideas Ep. 55
She produced her first video, “I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much” (1986), while still at school in Basel. In it, she bounces up and down, falling out of her dress, as she repeatedly sings the title line (derived from the lyrics to a Beatles song).
Internationally recognized
Pipilotti Rist’s work is at one and the same time high-tech and sensual, radiantly colorful and critical, weightless and body-bound. The camera is brush, eye and sense of touch, and the fusion of major themes revolves around the body, technology, the sensory and the sensual, gender, nature, inner and outer space, our arrangement of and being in the world.
Related: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen
Gaining acclaim for her work in the 1997 Venice Biennial, during which she received the Premio 2000 Prize, Rist continued her upward trajectory of international recognition, teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles with Paul McCarthy in 2002–2003, and being awarded the Joan Miró Prize in 2009.
Enjoy the Moving Pictures of Pipilotti Rist in Copenhagen
The exhibition ‘Åbn min lysning’ (Open My Glade) is the first major presentation of the artist’s work in Scandinavia and will span the whole output of the artist’s oeuvre — from early works in the TV format to large spatial video and audio installations with projections on ceilings, walls and floors. The exhibition, created for Louisiana in close collaboration with the artist herself, takes on the character of a site-specific immersive installation and continues out into the museum park.
She currently lives and works between Zurich and the mountains of Switzerland.
The exhibition runs: 1.3.2019 – 23.6.2019
Enjoy the Moving Pictures of Pipilotti Rist in Copenhagen, written by Tor Kjolberg