PAOLA PIVI IT JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER
Paola Pivi, Life is beautiful, 2007
Pivi, an Alaska-based Milanese born in 1971, has won international recognition for her ambitious, daring and thoughtful projects, which are often enormously complex to realize, are unusual in size and scope and require specialist technical knowledge to produce. The artist employs a variety of media, ranging from sculpture and photography to live actions involving animals and people. At the Kunsthalle Basel, an authoritative selection of the artist’s recent works will be shown, including “Alicudi project”, aimed at creating a 1:1 photograph of a Mediterranean island, and “E”, a cylindrical structure supporting thousands of steel needles that move in reaction to the presence of a human body, developed with scientists at the particle physics laboratory CERN in Geneva. A group of sculptural works will also be presented, and a series of drawings which are abstract to the point of dizziness.
The works in the exhibition testify to Pivi’s interest in oddities in popular culture and human relationships. The icons of high culture are merged with bland stereotypes. There is a neurotic underlining in the way the artist collects and re-samples motifs and themes in her work. Rather than following a strict pattern of formal coherence, Paola Pivi freely and organically appropriates and adapts different modes of expression and puts the existing images and themes into unexpected juxtapositions. She is seduced by the same world of spectacle, entertainment and banality which she is decisively confronting. In her photographs and during performative events of her design, people, animals and material objects are often shown in relation to some unfitting natural or artificial, bleak and familiar surroundings – a gallery, a jungle, a sea, a multiplicity of industrially-manufactured objects – and represented as alienated, displaced and solitary figures. In her works, t he vast, horizontal, oceanic perspective converges vertiginously in a single focal point – a person or an animal, dramatically and helplessly “there” – and yet out of place. An art dealer, an ostrich, an alligator, a designer chair, a solid block of vinyl ribbons – Pivi’s subjects constitute a heterogeneous collection of types, a circus of everyday life in 2007 A.D.
The show at the Kunsthalle Basel is conceived as a series of contradictory and complementary and highly intense experiences. Occupying both floors of the building, the exhibition culminates in “One cup of cappuccino, then I go”, a special project conceived for two large exhibition rooms on the ground floor of the Kunsthalle. Although the title may recall Bob Dylan, the work is not a ballad, but rather a wild thing. This piece will be presented in its entirety during the opening night only, on January 18, between 5 and 7 pm. During the following two months of the exhibition, a residual installation and a photograph will replace the opening piece. January 19 – March 18, 2007 Opening: Thursday, January 18 LINK
