Paola Pivi
It Just Keeps Getting Better
January 19-March 18, 2007
Opening: Thursday, January 18, 2007, 5pm
One cup of cappuccino, then I go will be on view between 5 and 7pm on the opening day.
KUNSTHALLE BASEL
Steinenberg 7
CH-4051 Basel
Switzerland
Tel 41 61 206 99 00 / Fax 41 61 206 99 19
info [at] kunsthallebasel.ch
Opening hours:
Tue/Wed/Fri 11am-6pm / Thu 11am-8.30pm /
Sat/Sun 11am-5pm
We are proud and privileged to present the first solo exhibition in Switzerland by Italian artist Paola Pivi.
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 artists 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 Pivis 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, the 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 Pivis 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.
Paola Pivi participated twice in the Venice Biennale and she has recently had an individual show at the Trussardi Foundation in Milan.
The exhibition is generously supported by: LUMA FOUNDATION.
For further information please visit our website: www.kunsthallebasel.ch
Kunsthalle Basel
Steinenberg 7
CH-4051 Basel
Switzerland
Tel 41 61 206 99 00
Fax 41 61 206 99 19
info@kunsthallebasel.ch
Opening hours: Tue/Wed/Fri 11am-6pm / Thu 11am-8.30pm / Sat/Sun 11am-5pm
