From 9 November to 18 December 2011, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi is presentingParasimpatico, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, the first major solo exhibition by Pipilotti Rist in Italy.
The setting for the Swiss artist’s new project is the former Cinema Manzoni, which for over fifty years was one of the most important movie theaters in Milan, and has been closed to the public since 2006.
more on: Fondazione Nicola Trussardi
edited by: Matteo Menotto
Pipilotti Rist is one of the most highly respected, unconventional voices in art today: she has had solo shows in the world’s best-known museums—including MoMA in New York and Centre Pompidou in Paris—and has participated in major international events such as the Venice Biennale and the biennials of Berlin, Sydney andLyon. In 2009 she presented her first feature-length film, Pepperminta, at the Venice Film Festival.
Floating visions, vibrant, psychedelic colors, hypnotic soundtracks, sensuality and ethereality are some of the main ingredients in the world of Pipilotti Rist, which lies at the border between dreams and reality. Her luxuriant videos and multimedia installations explore human sexuality and media culture with a playful, provocative blend of fantasy and everyday life, with images in movement transforming familiar subjects, themes and places into fascinating kaleidoscopes. For Pipilotti Rist, video images are a projection of desires and emotions, a new form of organic life that viewers can perceive not just with their eyes but with their bodies. Often hidden in unexpected places—toilets, liquor bottles, seashells and handbags—or projected onto evocative surfaces—church ceilings or giant television screens—her installations are explorations of the senses, all-enveloping experiences in which all physical and psychological distance from the viewer is abolished. In Rist’s visual journeys, viewers often find themselves in spaces with topsy-turvy proportions, reduced to lilliputian scale before giant images that heighten the sensation of childhood memories of a pure world, where corporeality seems reconciled with rationality and where sensuality takes on an almost spiritual dimension, sometimes tinged with irony and melancholy. The gateway into Pipilotti Rist’s work is our emotional side, the part of us that reacts involuntarily to external stimuli.
This observation inspired the title for her show with the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Parasimpatico: with her usual sense of humor, Pipilotti Rist is referring to the division of the nervous system that governs the body’s involuntary functions, such as digestion, relaxation, rest and energy storage. Like her previous installations, this project conceived for the former Cinema Manzoni combines old and new work, with the objective of transforming the former theater into a huge living creature, mingling cinema and television, hallucinations and high-definition images. In Parasimpatico, Pipilotti Rist wraps the sumptuously decorated spaces of the Manzoni—from the lobby to the grand staircase, and from the auditorium to the bar—in a new skin of images, an all-enveloping carousel of sound, light, and color that restores a joyous magic to what was once Milan’s most prestigious movie theater, in a final flutter of life before its definitive transformation. This exhibition by Pipilotti Rist will be a unique opportunity to see the spaces of the former Cinema Manzoni in their original beauty, after five years of closure.
For any further information
:
Fondazione Nicola Trussardi
Tel.+39.02.80.68.82.1
press@fondazionenicolatrussardi.com
