Erwin Redl
InMotion
February 6–March 15, 2014
bitforms gallery nyc
529 West 20th Street, second Floor
New York NY 10011
www.bitforms.com
View exhibition guide (PDF)
View installation photos
bitforms gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition with Austrian artist Erwin Redl. InMotion marks his first New York solo exhibition in nearly a decade. Featured in the 2002 Whitney biennial, Redl is best known for his immersive and architecturally scaled light installations. He has built dozens of site-specific projects, and among the most monumental is Fetch, a computer-controlled 580-foot-long outdoor LED installation created in 2010 for the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio.
Redl’s largest project, Diamond Matrix, will open at the New York Police Academy’s new building in Queens, fall 2014. Also presently in progress is a 2015 commission for the Union Square / Market Street subway station in San Francisco. This past September in Istanbul, Redl completed Meandering, a permanent commission for an eight-floor stairwell at Borusan Contemporary. Recently in the US, he opened Passing Through Light, an outdoor public work featuring sequenced LEDs at the I-77 underpass in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 2012, Redl also completed four animated light installations for Caesar Pelli’s Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.
Since 1997 Redl has investigated the process of “reverse engineering” by re-translating the abstract aesthetic language of virtual reality and 3-D computer modeling back into architectural environments. In this body of work, space is experienced as a second skin, our social skin. Visual perception works in conjunction with corporeal motion, and the subsequent passage of time.
The exhibition InMotion features Redl’s debut of four groups of minimalist and kinetic sculptures that study the influence of ephemeral forces such as light, wind and gravity on objects. Levitate fills an entire wall with thirty-one vertically suspended glass pipes. Each pipe has a small fan on the bottom, which propels a Ping-Pong ball up into the pipe. All thirty-one synchronized fans levitate the Ping-Pong balls in tightly choreographed sequences.
“Swing” is a four-part series of floor sculptures employing spring-loaded metal rods that are moved by fans mounted on top of the rods. The fans are turned on and off in sequence causing the rods to swing in formation. In Breath of Light a green laser beam reflects off different configurations of nine acrylic plates. “Inclined Plane” is a two-part series of smaller suspended sculptures that use fans to propel a Ping-Pong ball upward.
A fully illustrated exhibition guide is available at the gallery and online.
Biography
Erwin Redl (b. 1963; Gföhl, Austria) is an internationally acclaimed installation artist and presently based in Ohio. His artwork is collected both privately and publicly. It can also be experienced in the permanent installations that he has created for buildings and public spaces in New York, Istanbul, Toronto, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Arlington, Charlotte, and Birmingham.
Past exhibitions of his work have included the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Austrian Cultural Forum, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; Wexner Centre for the Arts, Columbus; Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Bloomberg Space, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Plug-In Institute, Winnipeg; Ace Gallery, Los Angeles; Apex Art, New York; Arts Electronica, Linz; Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh; Location One, New York; White Box Gallery, New York; Postmasters Gallery, New York; Eyebeam, New York; and the Kunsthalle Krems. Among the institutions holding his work are the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; Milwaukee Art Museum; Seattle Art Museum; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.
Redl’s past residencies have included the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; MoMA PS1, Queens, New York; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; and Art Omi International Artists Center in Ghent, New York. He holds two BAs from Vienna Music Academy in Composition (1993) and Electronic Music (1991), as well as a MFA in Computer Art (1995) from the School of Visual Arts, which he attended in New York on a Fulbright Scholarship.
For images and more information, please visit:
www.bitforms.com / www.vimeopro.com/bitforms/redl / www.paramedia.net
For further details, please contact info [at] bitforms.com or call T +1 212 366 6939.
