Monday Post 2-15-08

Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti is actually the nickname of Elisabeth Charlotte, a Swiss native born in Grabs in 1962. She earned the nickname, which refers to Pippi Longstocking, as a child. She has studied at the Institute of Applied Arts in Vienna and The School of Design in Basel, Switzerland. Her work was first featured in the Venice Biennial in 1997 and she won the Premio 2000 Prize. I am interested in Pipilotti because of her use of color and the abstract effects she uses which tie into hallucinogenic culture. She usually deals with gender, the human body, and sexuality, and her work has been regarded as feminist by some critics. Though these aspects interest me, I do not wish to pursue these ideas in my own art. The more I work, the less I want to add anything to my images. It feels too much like slapping a bumper sticker on a painting. I am beginning to experiment with using real images as masks to change light and color values to induce the illusion that I had added the picture to the abstract background. I often wish my work could be simply about color and line - but I guess that would just be too easy.

Website:
www.pipilottirist.net

Gallery:
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=9760

Interview:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_4_59/ai_69294352