Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist (born June 21, 1962, Grabs, Switzerland) is a Swiss video installation artist known for her provocative, often humorous, but always stylish work. (The name Pipilotti is one of her own creation, a fusion of her nickname, Lotti, with that of the energetic larger-than-life storybook heroine Pippi Longstocking in the eponymous work by Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren.)

Rist attended the Institute of Applied Arts in Vienna and the School of Design in Basel, Switzerland, where her first experiments were with animated cartoons and scenery for pop music concerts. From 1988 to 1994 she also played drums and bass in an all-girl rock band, Les Reines Prochaines (“The Next Queens”). In I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986), her first production, Rist starred as a hysterical brunette singing an altered line from a Beatles song. By the late 1980s she was producing vivid and slickly made videos. In the 1990s she exhibited at a number of major venues, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the National Gallery in Berlin. In 1998 she was one of six finalists for the Hugo Boss Prize (an award administered every two years by the Guggenheim Foundation for significant achievement in contemporary art), and her single-channel video installation Sip My Ocean (1996) was shown at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo in New York City. The following year, with Ever Is Over All (1997), she won the Premio 2000 Prize at the Venice Biennale. The work consists of two projections on adjacent walls; one channel moves through a field of red flowers, while the other shows a woman with a long-stemmed flower smashing the windows of cars parked on the street. (Musician Beyoncé resurrected interest in the work in 2016 when the video to her song “Hold Up” featured a similar sequence.)

Rist was renowned for bridging the gulf between popular culture and art and for merging various mediums. Her work drew deliberately on MTV-style pop music videos, but she added a reflective element of her own—pain and innocence were two of her favoured themes. Her installations captured the many contradictions and anxieties of modern society. For Selfless in a Bath of Lava (1994), for example, she removed a knot from a wooden floorboard in the P.S.1 gallery space and installed in its place a tiny video screen on which played a film loop picturing the artist, shrieking to be let out.

Rist began the 21st century with Open My Glade (Flatten) (2000), a commission from the New York Public Art Fund. The series of silent videos played in Times Square, New York, showing Rist comically pressing her face and hands against glass, as if eager to break the barrier between the screen and the living world. Other pieces from the decade included Stir Heart, Rinse Heart (2003), an installation of suspended found objects, including plastic coffee cup lids and egg cartons, which reflect projected videos of what appear to be blood vessels and waves. For À la belle étoile (2007; “Under the Stars”), Rist cast moving images of herself, clouds, fireworks, and landscapes onto the plaza of the Centre Pompidou, Paris. For the enormous atrium of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Rist created Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) (2008), a site-specific video installation that comprised a soundscape, a communal sofa, and a high-definition video of objects seen from a low angle. These objects included apples and tulips, which are later smashed and plucked. In 2009 Rist premiered her first feature film, Pepperminta, at the Venice Film Festival. Rist’s works from the 2010s included Parasimpatico (2011), wherein she projected a series of moving images with a soundtrack in an abandoned movie theatre in Milan; Mercy Garden (2014); Worry Will Vanish Horizon (2014); and Looking Through Pixel Forest (2016), which consists of 3,000 crystal-like globes that each encompass one pixel from a video.

Rist was chosen to represent Switzerland at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Her work was shown in a number of solo exhibitions, including at the New Museum (2016), New York; Museum of Fine Arts (2017), Houston; and Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2019).