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27/11/2014

Three exhibitions

Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton

Pipilotti Rist
Stay Stamina Stay

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to announce two exhibitions of new video works by Pipilotti Rist, unveiled in parallel presentations across its London and Somerset galleries.

A pioneer of video art, since the mid-eighties, Rist’s film installations take many guises. She has likened them in the past to handbags, ‘because there is room in them for everything: painting, technology, language, music, flowing pictures, poetry, commotion, premonitions of death, sex and friendliness.’ From this versatile, capricious medium, Rist draws inner and outer worlds of kaleidoscopic colourful wonderment.

Hauser & Wirth Somerset will present two new rooms by Pipilotti Rist and an installation of ‘hiplights’ in the farmyard. From summer 2012 through to summer 2013, Rist spent a sabbatical in Bruton, taking part in the first Hauser & Wirth Somerset artist residency. The experience had a profound impact upon her practice, producing new work in response to the surrounding landscape and the people she met.

Rist’s title ‘Stay Stamina Stay’ plays on its double-meaning; referencing the stamen, (the pollen-producing reproductive organ of a flower) and also a ‘resistance to hardship’. Rist is concerned with our connection and interaction with the world around us; how we relate to our landscape, what preconceptions we carry from our respective cultures, and what those cultures have in common. Through her sensuously observed close-ups of the natural environment and the human body, Rist is interested in the ‘often unbelievable strength that humans are generating every day.

In the Rhoades Gallery, ‘Mercy Garden’ (2014) is projected onto two of the walls; the luscious imagery in the installation comes mostly from footage the artist shot whilst living in Somerset. Slow motion close-ups play out in mirrored effect; fingers stroke stinging nettles, hands caress soft vivid petals, lips purse underwater and washing floats in the breeze, against a bright blue sky. The images are filtered and layered, set to a soundtrack of banjo folk music by Heinz Rohrer, inviting visual and tactile wonder and engaging all of the senses.

This sumptuous all-encompassing environment is designed for relaxation and meditation; the floor is partially carpeted in lush green with Somerset sheepskin rugs scattered across. Rist encourages her viewers to recline, inviting them to contemplate, and at the same time, to share a collective experience with their fellow spectators.

Rist is commonly known for creating works that are at once feminist and feminine, often exploring the female body; but in ‘Mercy Garden’, all of the characters are men (or boys) and the film celebrates a masculine strength, combined with fragility and tenderness. The main character, a young local farmer, is shown interacting with his natural environment. Visceral images of his hands running through soil and tending plants pose questions about life and death, and humans’ relationship to the natural world. Rist describes the work as ‘a poem about agriculture, the farmer, his body, his fingers and his machines as an extension of the body’.

On entering the Bourgeois Gallery, the viewer is immersed in another of Rist’s parallel worlds. The installation ‘Sleeping Pollen’ (2014) is projected through seven mirrored spheres, suspended from the ceiling, which create moving projections all around the space. Visitors are invited to move in and around the projections, and also to become part of them, reflecting the artist’s continuing desire to create a close relationship between work and viewer. The doors and windows have been covered in translucent acetate in cherry red and moss green, creating a hazy glow that changes in intensity throughout the day. Rist describes ‘Sleeping Pollen’ as ‘offering the winter plants an electronic bed in a dark cosy room. Their dreams spin slowly in the air’.

Outside, the installation ‘Hiplights’ (2011), which was first conceived for Rist’s solo exhibition ‘Eyeball Massage’ at the Hayward Gallery, London in 2011, is a remarkable, outdoor light work, created from hundreds of pairs of underpants with LED lamps. The underwear is strung between each of the buildings around the farmyard, like an enormous celebratory washing line

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John Chamberlain
Gondolas

Hauser & Wirth Somerset is proud to present John Chamberlain: Gondolas, showcasing two large-scale, floor-based works from the Gondolas series (1981 – 1982), a key group of Chamberlain’s sculptures, which has remained remarkably undiscovered. The full series comprises fourteen sculptures (including the large-scale related work ‘Dooms Day Flotilla’). Five of the Gondolas are in the collection of the DIA foundation in New York, NY and three are in the Chinati foundation in Marfa, Texas. Each of the Gondolas is named after an American poet or writer.

Known for his use of found and repurposed auto parts, dating back to the 1960s, Chamberlain used these contemporary, inexpensive materials to create lavishly coloured and layered sculptures. With its emphasis on paint finishes and the raw materials’ lines and seams, his work has been described as three-dimensional Abstract-Expressionist painting. Often misunderstood, Chamberlain had little interest in the material as subject matter; his concerns with the car parts were entirely practical, preferring the works to be viewed aesthetically – as sculpture.

Gondola Marianne Moore and Gondola Hart Crane are elongated structures, consisting of cut up truck frames as armatures, piled with pieces of cut, folded and crushed scrap metal; their horizontal floor-based configuration is reminiscent of the Venetian gondola. Chamberlain has taken advantage of the existing colour of each car fragment, and by spraying, stencilling, dribbling, graffitiing, and airbrushing layers of brilliant hues, onto the metal, he has created vivid, carnivalesque effects.

Chamberlain spoke often of the ‘right fit’ or ‘sexual fit’ as he joined piece-to-piece, interlocking steel bands and transforming them from cold anonymous parts, into a living mass. Klaus Kertess describes the sculptures as ‘engaged in intimate play by his (Chamberlain’s) hands in a kind of trial and error mating dance, continuing until two shapes are compatibly joined – and then another is coaxed to participate and then another, in a kind of agitated visual orgy….Seldom has sculpture so physically embodied the free associativeness and combinative play so crucial to creative thinking visually and verbally.’

Chamberlain’s titles rarely make direct reference to the form or content of the individual work. Assigning specific hidden codes or establishing definitive meanings is not the intention. His naming of the Gondolas was a tribute to his favourite writers, whose work he first encountered whilst a student at Black Mountain College. His teachers included poets Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson; Chamberlain considered that his years at the college were the greatest influence on his work. Whist there, he began writing his own poems, arranging words and fragments that he had collected from various sources, into new configurations – a method he later likened to his sculptural work: ‘There is material to be seen around you every day. But one day something – some one thing – pops out at you, and you pick it up, and you take it over, and you put it somewhere else, and it fits, it’s just the right thing at the right moment. You can do the same thing with words or with metal. I guess that’s part of my definition of art. Art is a peculiar madness in which you use other means of communication, means that are recognisable to other people, to say something that they haven’t yet heard, or haven’t perceived, or had repressed.’

Marianne Moore, a recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the National Book Award, was one of the foremost American poets of the Twentieth Century. Her work is characterised by a joy in vernacular language, emotional candour, and acute observations of people, places, animals, and art. As the editor of several of the most important poetry journals, and as an enthusiast for modern art, she would have been well-known to Chamberlain, and his Black Mountain College teacher, Charles Olson.

Hart Crane is a pivotal figure in American literature, and he is regarded as both the quintessential Romantic artist and the embodiment of those extreme characteristics – hope and despair, redemption and damnation – that seemed to preoccupy many writers in his time. After battling depression and career disappointments, during a sea voyage between Mexico and the United States he finally took his own life, by leaping into the Gulf of Mexico. Chamberlain’s ‘Gondola Hart Crane’ can be seen in part as a memorial to Crane’s watery end.

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Richard Tuttle

Hauser & Wirth Somerset is excited to present the gallery’s first exhibition dedicated to renowned American artist Richard Tuttle. Having works previously on display as part of ‘Re-view: Onnasch Collection’ (2013 – 2014) at Hauser & Wirth London and Hauser & Wirth New York, Tuttle returns as the focus in a solo exhibition devoted to his works from the 1980s, a highly creative period in his career. The exhibition showcases a selection of Tuttle’s multi-media assemblages, offering an insight into his improvised free-form aesthetic and his delicate three-dimensional work, with its abundance of colours, shapes and materials.

Emerging in the 1960s in a generation of process-oriented postminimalism, Tuttle has created a remarkable and varied body of work that defies historical or stylistic categorisation. The visual language of the work has a lot in common with painting, sculpture, poetry and drawing, yet it appears to exist in the space between these practices. His process is deeply instinctual and responsive, crafting unique objects that must be encountered on their own terms.

Tuttle’s artistic evolution in the 1980s echoed a general reaction in the art world to the reductive formalism and reserve that had come to dominate artistic discourse in the preceding decade. His wall-affixed assemblage constructions began to incorporate more diverse materials and also began to literally expand into three-dimensional space. With these works, Tuttle subverted expectations about Modernist sculpture and instead created small poetic objects.

Tuttle’s dedication to every-day materials, such as aluminium, foil, plastic and rope, emphasises the hand-made, hand-held nature of the objects and as a result, imbues them with a sense of familiarity and intimacy. The significance of the everyday is highlighted in the 1984 series ‘Two or More’ – utilising cardboard, wire, wood, plastic, foil and even an aluminium Pepsi can. The geometry of the cardboard backings is pitted against the plasticity of the objects Tuttle attaches to them. Held together with palpable delicacy by ephemeral connective materials – like fine wire, cursory gluing and in other cases, tape. He aims to make a singular world out of disparate parts, and in doing so changes the inference of individual objects, mitigating their beginnings and creating a new compostition altogether.

Tuttle wants viewers to use visual and tactile senses to perceive the work. The pieces are deliberately hung lower than eye height to relate them equally to the hand, allowing the viewer to experience a sense of the hand and eye being engaged simultaneously – which is the experience of the artist in creating the works. Tuttle intends the viewer to engage in new sensory experiences, and in doing so, expand their contact with the totality of human existence. ‘One remarkable phenomenon of my work is its love for being hung at a height of fifty-four inches from the floor… [This height] brings me in contact with anything that’s ever existed in human life.’

Image: John Chamberlain, Gondola Marianne Moore, 1982, Painted and chrome-plated steel

Press Contact
Rosie McAllister, rosie@hauserwirth.com,

Opening: Friday 28 November, 5 – 7.30 pm

Hauser & Wirth Somerset
Durslade Farm
Dropping Lane, Bruton
Somerset BA10 0NL

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