Neon Parc is proud to present Australian artist Stuart Ringholt at ART COLOGNE, exhibiting car sculptures in addition to a suite of collages, a video and a naturist tour of the fair. 

On the occasion of the 50th ART COLOGNE Ringholt will show two actions. In front of Entrance Hall South and in hall 11.3 of Koelnmesse he will place a selection of cars that will perform as sculptures, operating at the junction between everyday life and the art world. The artist will also offer a private tour through the trade fair where the participants will be entirely unclothed. Ringholts practice is marked by an anti-institutional and anti-authoritarian approach, its participatory elements are both therapeutic and confrontational.

The compact cars, which Stuart Ringholt will place at the entrance, seem like displaced foreign bodies: they appear ordinary and banal transported into the context of an art fair. However, on closer inspection, the observer notices their personalised license plates, which are usually found on luxury vehicles underlining the status of their owners. Ringholt thus humorously, and in a manner open to interpretation, references the typical roles within the art world. Displayed in the NADA Related Videos program is the work, Starring William Shatner as Curator 2010, which consists of excerpts from Star Trek episodes where the actors are recast as art world characters. Here a parallel is set up, and parodied, between the mystery associated with art and the unknown of the intergalactic. 

Ringholt’s private tours of the trade fair for ART COLOGNE, Preceded by a tour of the show by artist Stuart Ringholt 6 – 8 p.m. (the artist will be naked. Those who wish to join the tour must also be naked. Adults only), alters the tour participant’s perception of the artworks, and they become collaged components of the fair. The artist has previously carried out this performance: in 2015 at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and in 2012 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. However, this will be the first time it has been undertaken in a more commercialized setting. 

A suite of collages (titled Nudes) will also be displayed consisting of pin-up found images onto which images of artworks have been strategically placed. While in the naturist tours the body is represented in bare objective form, in the Nudes series the body is presented admitting sexuality in a way that the tours do not, staging the art object juxtaposed with the reflected gaze of the sex object.