RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA

David Zwirner is pleased to present a new participatory exhibition by Rirkrit Tiravanija, on view at the gallery’s Hong Kong location. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition at David Zwirner since the announcement that he will be working with the gallery. In May 2021, Tiravanija’s seminal early work untitled 1990 (pad thai) was featured in The Real World, a group exhibition at the gallery’s Hong Kong location.

Tiravanija is best known for his intimate, participatory installations that revolve around personal and shared communal traditions, such as cooking Thai meals, that are, in the words of curator Rochelle Steiner, ‘fundamentally about bringing people together.’ At the forefront of the shift in avant-garde art practices in the 1990s away from traditional art objects and toward ‘relational aesthetics’— that incorporate diverse cultural spaces, practices, and temporalities—, Tiravanija has continually challenged and expanded the social dimension of art, inviting people from all walks of life to inhabit the special and personal spaces that he constructs and to communally engage in shared rituals and actions. Over the course of his thirty-year career, he has also come to incorporate into his art and installations a wide variety of media, including painting, printmaking, video, photography, mixed-media assemblage, and music.

[1] Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, ‘Shall We Dance?,’ The New Yorker (October 17, 2005), p. 82.