PIPILOTTI RIST

At each location visitors will be greeted with an artistic gesture on the façade: the work Textile Simultaneity atLuhring Augustine and Innocent Collection at Hauser & Wirth.

At Luhring Augustine Chelsea on West 24th Street, visitors will be taken on a journey through an expansive’backyard’ environment animated by sounds, colors and textures. In the entrance gallery they encounter newsmall-scale works—a landscape painting, Visual Cortex Dolomites, and a rock sculpture, Respect ScholarlyRock—each of which is activated by hypnotic video projections. The main gallery is dominated by Rist’sspellbinding Neighbors Without Fences (2020), a full-scale façade of a clapboard house, which is surroundedby a ‘courtyard’ filled with outdoor patio furniture and anchored by The Patience (2016), a massive 1.5-tonboulder awash in the colors of a dynamic projection. A version of Neighbors Without Fences debuted as ahighlight in Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor, Rist’s 2021–22 survey exhibition at The Museum of ContemporaryArt, Los Angeles. Each window of the clapboard façade contains a glowing screen displaying new videos madespecifically for this exhibition; the works are from Rist’s Peeping Freedom Shutters series (2020-2023), a groupof unique video sculptures that pay homage to women’s rights activists whose fearless advocacy has openedwindows onto the possibility of a more equitable world.

The back gallery will present Big Skin (2022), a version of which was first included in Rist’s solo exhibition Behind Your Eyelid at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong. The installation’s undulating, semi-translucent resinpanels, or ‘skins,’ float cloud-like from the ceiling with video projections of real and animated galaxies and naturallandscapes dancing across their surfaces. The resin material of these skins simultaneously absorbs and emitslight, creating ghostly shadows across the walls and floor, transporting viewers into another dimension.

At Hauser & Wirth’s West 22nd Street building, Rist will transform the entire street level space into a ‘livingroom’ painted in lush reds and vegetal greens. Here guests will discover single-channel sculptural video works,including many presented publicly for the first time. For each of these works, Rist has embedded a video into afound domestic object or piece of furniture—from Ich brenne für dich (I burn for you) (2018), fashioned from anantique marble fireplace mantle to Über Stock und Stein (Over Hill and Dale) (2023), which animates the interiorof a vintage toy horse stable with different oscillating forms and colors. A new group of sculptures, together titled Metal Flake Milk Tooth (2023), punctuates the space in an arrangement laying low across the gallery floor. Withtheir furniture-like qualities—each form evokes yet subverts the familiar geometries of a chair or coffee table—these objects hew to Rist’s longstanding fascination with the reflective and emotive potentials of light: constructedfrom fiberglass composite, the sculptures have been coated with metal flakes, airbrushed candy colors and clearlacquer that yield glittery, optically dynamic surfaces which defy capture by photography. Metal Flake Milk Tooth thus happily demands that we experience it in three dimensions and be present in its space in order to engage itspleasures. Two new major video projections—Welling Color Island East (2023) and Welling Color Island West (2023)—and the new moving light installation Petting Colors (2023) complete Rist’s interior adventure at Hauser& Wirth. Her richly colored projections swirl down from the ceiling onto carpet ‘islands’ occupied by cushionedseating areas for communal occupancy and immersion. The gently moving lights of ‘Petting Colors’ dance acrossthe room to land upon visitors and connect them to one another as well as Rist’s other works in situ, makingmembers of the public active participants in her enchantments.