ART-PRESENTATION: Pipilotti Rist-Pixel Forest

Over the past thirty years, Pipilotti Rist has achieved international renown as a pioneer of video art and multimedia installations. Her works envelop viewers in sensual, vibrantly colored kaleidoscopic projections that fuse the natural world with the technological sublime. Referring to her art as a “glorification of the wonder of evolution”, the artist maintains a deep sense of curiosity that pervades her explorations of physical and psychological experiences.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: New Museum Archive

Occupying the three main floors of the New Museum, the exhibition “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest” is the most comprehensive presentation of Rist’s work in New York to date. It includes works spanning the artist’s entire career, from her early single-channel videos from the ‘80s to her recent expansive video installations that transform architectural spaces into massive dreamlike environments enhanced by hypnotic musical scores. Featuring a new installation created specifically for this presentation, this exhibition also reveals connections between the development of Rist’s art and the evolution of contemporary technologies. After working as a graphic designer in her native Switzerland, Rist gained a following in the mid-80s as a member of the experimental post-punk pop group Les Reines Prochaines, for which she made some of her earliest video works. Rist created a series of music-based single-channel tapes that subvert the form of the music video to explore the female voice and body in pop cultural representations, merging rock music and performance with electronic manipulation. Rist’s burgeoning interests in all forms of electronic media production made her well suited for the wave of video installation that emerged in the art world of the early ‘90s. Over the next ten years, she developed a video aesthetic that takes its cues from television and advertising, as well as from a rich history of feminist video work. Rist’s achievement has been to join themes from this tradition with the influence of Nam June Paik and the hyper-kinetic aesthetic that he pioneered. The results have been successful and influential, Rist has become one of the most recognizable names in contemporary video art. Rist’s critical engagement is marked by a pointed exploitation of pop culture’s investment in desire. Fantasy is at the heart of her work: her dream-like scenes often seem so loaded with suggestive images and scenarios that they threaten to collapse under their own meaning, saved, in the end, by her light touch and ironic humor.

Info: Curators: Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson, Margot Norton & Helga Christoffersen, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 26/10/16-15/1/17, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org