Pipilotti Rist


Pipilotti Rist is a visual artist. She is best known for creating experimential video art and installation art that often portrays self-portraits and singing. Her work is often described as surreal, intimate, abstract art, having a preoccupation with the female body. Her artwork is often categorized as feminist art. In a 2011 Guardian exhibition review article, Rist describes her feminism: "Politically," she says, "I am a feminist, but personally, I am not. For me, the image of a woman in my art does not stand just for women: she stands for all humans. I hope a young guy can take just as much from my art as any woman."

Life and career

Pipilotti Rist was born Elisabeth Rist in Grabs in the Rhine Valley. Her father is a doctor and her mother is a teacher. She started going by "Pipilotti", a combination her childhood nickname "Lotti" with her childhood hero, Astrid Lindgren’s character Pippi Longstocking, in 1982. Prior to studying art and film, Rist studied theoretical physics in Vienna for one semester. From 1982 to 1986 Rist studied commercial art, illustration, and photography at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in Vienna. She later studied video at the Basel School of Design, Switzerland. From 1988 through 1994, she was member of the music band and performance group Les Reines prochaines. In 1997, her work was first featured in the Venice Biennial, where she was awarded the Premio 2000 Prize. From 2002 to 2003, she was invited by Professor Paul McCarthy to teach at UCLA as a visiting faculty member. From Summer 2012 through to Summer 2013, Rist spent a sabbatical in Somerset.
Rist lives in Zurich, Switzerland with her partner Balz Roth, an entrepreneur. She and Roth have a son, Himalaya.
Rist is represented by Hauser & Wirth alongside other widely known modern and contemporary women artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, Lorna Simpson, and Eva Hesse.
Her first feature film, Pepperminta, had its world premiere at the 66th Venice International Film Festival in 2009. She summarized the plot as "a young woman and her friends on a quest to find the right color combinations and with these colors they can free other people from fear and make life better.”

Works

During her studies, Pipilotti Rist began making super 8 films. Her works generally last only a few minutes, borrowing from mass-media formats such as MTV and advertising, with alterations in their colors, speed, and sound. Her works generally treat issues related to gender, sexuality, and the human body.
Her colorful and musical works transmit a sense of happiness and simplicity. Rist's work is regarded as feminist by some art critics. Her works are held by many important art collections worldwide.
In I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much Rist dances before a camera in a black dress with uncovered breasts. The images are often monochromatic and fuzzy. Rists repeatedly sings "I'm not the girl who misses much," a reference to the first line of the song "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" by the Beatles. As the video approaches its end, the image becomes increasingly blue and fuzzy and the sound stops.
Rist achieved notoriety with Pickelporno , a work about the female body and sexual excitation. The fisheye camera moves over the bodies of a couple. The images are charged by intense colors, and are simultaneously strange, sensual, and ambiguous.
Sip My Ocean, a video projected as a mirrored reflection on two adjoining walls, shows a dreamlike series of images of a bikini-clad woman swimming underwater among sinking tea cups, televisions, and other domestic objects. It is accompanied by a soundtrack of Rist singing Chris Isaak’s "Wicked Game", occasionally punctuated by Rist's repeated shrieking of the lyrics “I don’t want to fall in love.”
Ever is Over All shows in slow-motion a young woman walking along a city street, smashing the windows of parked cars with a large hammer in the shape of a tropical flower. At one point a police officer greets her. The audio video installation has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Rist's nine video segments titled Open My Glade were played once every hour on a screen at Times Square in New York City, a project of the Messages to the Public program, which was founded in 1980.
Pour Your Body Out was a commissioned multimedia installation organized by Klaus Biesenbach and installed in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in early 2009. In an interview with Phong Bui published in The Brooklyn Rail, Rist said she chose the atrium for the installation "because it reminds me of a church's interior where you’re constantly reminded that the spirit is good and the body is bad. This spirit goes up in space but the body remains on the ground. This piece is really about bringing those two differences together."

Collections

Rist's work is held in the permanent collections of museums and galleries including the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco MoMA, and the Utrecht Centraal Museum.

Influence

Ever is Over All was referenced in 2016 by Beyoncé in the film accompanying her album Lemonade in which the singer is seen walking down a city street smashing windows of parked cars with a baseball bat.

Recognition