Salon

‘Creed is a social artist; the true magic of his work lies in the way it interacts with people and places.’—Jonathan Jones, ‘Martin Creed’s stairway to heaven,’ in The Guardian, London, UK, 1 August 2011, ill. (on Work No. 1059)

Influenced by 1960s counterculture, the free speech movement, and the surf ethos of her native California, Mary Heilmann ranks amongst the most influential abstract painters of her generation. Considered one of the preeminent contemporary Abstract painters, Heilmann’s practice overlays the analytical geometries of Minimalism with the spontaneous ethos of the Beat Generation, and are always distinguishable by their often unorthodox—always joyful—approach to color and form.

Raised in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Heilmann completed a degree in literature, before she studied ceramics at Berkeley. Only after moving to New York in 1968 did she begin to paint. While most artists at that time were experimenting with the concept of dematerialization and demanding that painting should avoid any references to experience outside the material presence of the work itself, Heilmann opted for painting, rebelling against the accepted rules. ‘Rather than following the decrees of modern, non-representational formalism, I started to understand that the essential decisions taken during the creative process were more and more related to content. The Modern movement was over…’

Since then, Heilmann has created compositions that evoke a variety of associations. Her work may be non-representational and based on an elementary, geometrical vocabulary—circles, squares, grids and stripes—but there is always something slightly eccentric, casual about them. The simplicity of the forms is played down by a deceptive form of nonchalance: the contours are not clearly defined. In some paintings, amorphous forms appear to melt into each other like liquid wax. Splashes of color can be discerned, sharp edges bleed for no apparent reason, and the ductus of the brushstrokes is always perceptible. Heilmann’s casual painting technique conceals a frequently complex structure that only gradually reveals itself to the viewer.

A pre-eminent figure in American contemporary art since the 1970s, Richard Jackson is influenced by both Abstract Expressionism and action painting, exploring a performative painting process which seeks to extend the potential of painting by upending its technical conventions. Born in Sacramento, California in 1939, Jackson first came to international attention with a major presentation of his installation works at the Menil Collection, Houston, in 1988, followed by the 1992 exhibition, ‘Helter Skelter,’ at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.Jackson’s work is process-oriented, and the structural aspect of his installations involves a high level of craftsmanship and engineering. However, the final application of paint is generated through an automated process which Jackson calls ‘activation.’ He equips his ‘painting machines’ with a network of pipes and hoses which, when deployed, cause violent eruptions of paint that immerse the work and surrounding area. The finished installations remain in the aftermath of this extreme and unpredictable performative action.

Jackson responds to the high-mindedness of painterly practice by repositioning painting as an everyday experience. For Jackson, paint is not a tool used to create a representational image, but is used as a ubiquitous liquid which is spurted, splattered and sprayed over the surface of his installations.

He draws on the visual lexicon of domestic environments, universal basic human activities, and hallmarks of the quintessential American life such as hunting and sports. By harnessing this imagery and combining it with a physically laborious and conceptually rigorous artistic practice, Jackson has produced a body of work that questions and challenges the structure of the art world at large for over four decades.

Born in London in 1969, Bharti Kher’s art gives form to quotidian life and its daily rituals in a way that reassesses and transforms their meaning to yield an air of magical realism. Now living between London, UK and New Delhi, India, her use of found objects is informed by her own position as an artist located between geographic and social milieus. Her way of working is exploratory: surveying, looking, collecting, and transforming, as she repositions the viewer’s relationship with the object and initiates a dialogue between metaphysical and material pursuits.

The bindi is an iconic personal affect of Indian women that is one of Kher’s signature materials and a loaded symbol. Since first appearing in her work in 1995, the bindi has inherited an aesthetic and cultural duality, a means to mix the superficial with the sublime. Kher explains: ‘Many people believe it’s a traditional symbol of marriage while others, in the West particularly, see it as a fashion accessory... But actually the bindi is meant to represent a third eye—one that forges a link between the real and the spiritual-conceptual worlds.’ Used as a material to articulate and animate her themes, bindis as such are not meant to be the central-motif of her work but rather act as a material, much like paint or clay, but with an inherent narrative. The bindis themselves undergo a shift in their initial cultural capital—they are defamiliarized, made to seem both scientific and mystical.

At the center of Kher’s practice are her sculptures, early examples of which featured fantastical hybrid characters, blurring the distinctions between humans and nature, ecology and politics. In line with this early practice, Kher continues to assemble, juxtapose and transform found objects that are witness to their own histories. Wooden wheels and architectural remnants, mannequin body casts and pillars all clash in mis-en-scenes of dystopia and grand orchestration. These elements are assembled in a hazardous manner; suspended from the ceiling, hanging from ropes, propped up and held from falling with the help of counterweights and balances; ultimately forming a heterogeneous narrative in which Kher further explores the artistic strategy of stripping objects of their meaning and making them open to misinterpretation and magic, creating alluring works of abstract beauty.

Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums—from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting.

During the 1990s, he extended his practice into installations and stand-alone sculptural figures, utilizing a range of materials such as fiberglass, silicone, animatronics and inflatable vinyl. Playing on popular illusions and cultural myths, fantasy and reality collide in a delirious yet poignant exploration of the subconscious, in works that simultaneously challenge the viewer’s phenomenological expectations.

Whether absent or present, the human figure has been a constant in his work, either through the artist‘s own performances or the array of characters he creates to mix high and low culture, and provoke an analysis of our fundamental beliefs. These playfully oversized characters and objects critique the worlds from which they are drawn: Hollywood, politics, philosophy, science, art, literature, and television. McCarthy’s work, thus, locates the traumas lurking behind the stage set of the American Dream and identifies their counterparts in the art historical canon.

McCarthy earned a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969, and an MFA in multimedia, film and art from USC in 1973.  For 18 years, he taught performance, video, installation, and art history in the New Genres Department at UCLA, where he influenced future generations of west coast artists and he has exhibited extensively worldwide. McCarthy’s work comprises collaborations with artist-friends such as Mike Kelley and Jason Rhoades, as well as his son Damon McCarthy.

Pipilotti Rist, a pioneer of spatial video art, was born 1962 in Grabs in the Swiss Rhine Valley on the Austrian Border and has been a central figure within the international art scene since the mid-1980s.

Astounding the art world with the energetic exorcistic statement of her now famous single channel videos, such as ‘I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much,’ 1986 and ‘Pickelporno,’ 1992, her artistic work has co-developed with technical advancements and in playful exploration of its new possibilities to propose footage resembling a collective brain. Through large video projections and digital manipulation, she has developed immersive installations that draw life from slow caressing showers of vivid color tones, like her works ‘Sip My Ocean,’ 1996 or ‘Worry Will Vanish,’ 2014.

For Rist, showing vulnerability is a sign of strength on which she draws for inspiration. With her curious and lavish recordings of nature (to which humans belong as an animal), and her investigative editing, Rist seeks to justify the privileged position we are born with, simply by being human. Her installations and exhibition concepts are expansive, finding within the mind, senses and body the possibility for endless discovery and poetical invention. ‘Pixel Forest,’ 2016, made from 3,000 thousand LEDs hung on strings, resembles a movie screen that has exploded into the room, allowing viewers an immersive walk through 3-dimensional video. As she herself puts it, ‘beside the energy-intensive exploration of the geographical world, pictures, films and sounds have been and are the spaces into which we can escape... The projector is the flamethrower, the space is the vortex and you are the pearl within.’

Since 1984, Rist has had countless solo and group exhibitions, and video screenings worldwide. Her recent solo exhibitions are 'Electric Idyll' at the Fire Station Doha (2024), 'Prickling Goosebumps & A Humming Horizon' at Hauser & Wirth New York and Luhring Augustine Chelsea (2023-24), 'Behind Your Eyelid' at Tai Kwun Hong Kong (2022), ‘Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor’ at The Geffen Contemporary, MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2021 – 2022), ‘Your Eye Is My Island’ at MoMAK, The National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto and ART TOWER MITO (2021). ‘Åbn min Lysning. Open my Glade’ at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Humlebæk Denmark (2019), ‘Sip My Ocean’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney (2017 – 2018), ‘Pixel Forest’ at New Museum New York (2016 – 2017) and ‘Your Saliva is My Diving Suit of the Ocean of Pain’ at Kunsthaus Zürich (2016), all resulted in record-breaking attendance numbers for each institution. A major exhibition is planned for summer 2025 at UCCA Beijing.

The oeuvre of the Berlin-based artist David Zink Yi revolves around themes of creation, manifestation, and the construction of identity. Born in Lima in 1973, Zink Yi left Peru for Germany at the age of 16. Drawing inspiration from his own experiences, he interrogates the complex aspects of identity construction through his multi-disciplinary practice; encompassing film, photography, sculpture, performance, ceramics and multi-channel video installations, which all emphasize the social interrelation of the protagonists, as well as physiological aspects of musical perception.

Zink Yi’s art has gained attention for its critical engagement with culturally and emotionally determined actions and experiences. These actions, such as cooking, speaking, dancing, singing, writing and narrating, sketch the complexity of identity, identity-formation and their forms of expression and are most often the performative stimulus for making the works. Over the past decades, the artist has been using natural forms, ritual, music and dance to explore the complex motifs as constructed within cultural traditions. As a medium of expression, the body is often present in the works. It is the place at which the limits between outward and inward experience, between factual history and personal feeling, are drawn.

Over the past few years, Zink Yi has worked within the ceramic tradition to create sculptural works inspired by different molluscs and cephalopods such as octopus fragments, squids and architeuthidae. These elusive animals, with a rich history in myth and fine art, are understood as a complex living species opposite to the human one.

One of the most influential artists of the post-World War II period, Dieter Roth was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1930, to a German mother and a Swiss father, and died in Basel, Switzerland in 1998. Dieter Roth was an artist of an immense diversity and breadth, producing books, graphics, drawings, paintings, sculptures, assemblages, installations, audio and media works involving slides, sound recordings, film and video. He also worked as a composer, poet, writer and musician. He often collaborated with other artists, subverting the principle of authorship. Those partners included such significant figures as Richard Hamilton, Emmett Williams, Arnulf Rainer, and Hermann Nitsch. But it was Roth's long and symbiotic collaboration with his son, artist Björn Roth, that stands as testament to the enormous and enduring potency of his restless, relentless process.

Through much of his life, Roth was restlessly peripatetic, moving between studios in many cities. His two primary bases of activity—Iceland and Basel—were decidedly outside the mainstream. Throughout his career, the artist continually circled back to earlier ideas and processes, reinterpreting and transforming works so that linearity and closure are consistently defied. Transience and order, destruction and creativity, playful humor and critical inquiry, the abject and the beautiful, all maintain a consistent balance throughout his work.

Roth represented Switzerland at the 1982 Venice Biennale, and received a number of awards and prizes, including the 1991 Genevan Prix Caran d'Ache Beaux Arts, a prestigious Swiss prize. In 2004, The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City jointly presented the major historical exhibition ‘Roth Time: A Dieter Roth Retrospective,’ a project co-organized with Schaulager Basel, Switzerland, and the Museum Ludwig of Cologne, Germany.

For almost 60 years, British artist Phyllida Barlow took inspiration from her surroundings to create imposing installations that can be at once menacing and playful. She created large-scale yet anti-monumental sculptures from inexpensive, low-grade materials such as cardboard, fabric, plywood, polystyrene, scrim, plaster and cement. These constructions were often painted in industrial or vibrant colors, the seams of their construction left at times visible, revealing the means of their making.

Barlow’s restless invented forms stretch the limits of mass, volume and height as they block, straddle and balance precariously. The audience is challenged into a new relationship with the sculptural object, the gallery environment and the world beyond.

‘There’s something about walking around sculpture that has the possibility of being reflective, like walking through a landscape,’ Barlow has said. ‘The largeness of sculpture has that infinite possibility to make one engage beyond just the object itself and into other realms of experience.’

Barlow exhibited extensively across institutions internationally and in 2017 represented Britain at the Venice Biennale.