Pipilotti Rist - "I Couldn't Agree With You More

Pipilotti Rist (*1962) is a Swiss video artist who deals with conventions and taboos in her sensual and bold video installations in an entertaining, ironic and self-aware way. She studied commercial, illustration and photography as well as audiovisual design in Vienna and Basel. From 1988 to 1994 she was a member of the music performance group Les Reines Prochaines. She has received numerous prizes and scholarships for her work, including the Swiss Federal Art Scholarship (1991 and 1993), the Manor Art Prize St. Gallen (1994), the Prix Joan Miro (2009), the Zurich Festival Prize (2013) and the Prix Meret Oppenheim (2014).

The starting point for many of her video installations are the graphic qualities and cinematic potential of the television and the homely ambience associated with it, which Rist translates into the exhibition space. For Rist, the colour noise in particular lends the medium of video a painterly quality. Spectacular camera movements and overlapping images, which together with image distortions and associative montages give rise to dreamlike sequences, are characteristic of her video films.

In her works, the artist deals with themes such as corporeality, intimacy, transformation and sexuality.
In collaboration with the architect Gabrielle Hächler, Pipilotti Rist built the Rote Bar at the Hotel Castell in Zuoz in 1996.

Rist's video installation Homo Sapiens Sapiens, shown at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 in the Church of San Staë, marked her position as one of the most important figures in the international art world. The video was projected onto the vault above the nave and shows scenes from the heavenly paradise before the Fall. Tropical nature scenes form the background for surreal dream images that tell of two women, human skin and lush nature.

Rist projects her videos not only on vaults, but also on floors, ceilings, furniture and curtains, creating holistic environments in which visitors become part of the installation.

In 2017, Rist played Times Square in New York with her work Open My Glade. The work could be seen on 60 screens every day at 11:57 pm. It shows the artist herself, who seems to be pressing her nose, hands and mouth against the oversized glass panes. With distorted facial features and smeared make-up, Rist addresses the media's expectations associated with an outdated image of women and competes with the digital advertising storm in Times Square with her images.

The work I Couldn't Agree With You More (1999), acquired by the Walter A. Bechtler Foundation in 2001, shows the artist in a shopping mall and in a flat. As she films her face striding through the world, shots of naked figures, hiding from car headlights, can be seen in a green, hazy forest landscape on her forehead. Rist contrasts consumerism and the capitalist world of commodities with the unconscious drives and needs of human beings and alludes to an ideal state in which the world was supposed to have been in harmony with nature and free of conventions. The work is, so to speak, a selfie "avant la lettre", in which the inner film contrasts with the outer reality. The artist also addresses the contradictory development that the closer people live together in urban agglomerations, the more they behave towards each other like "shy deer"