Winners of the 2021 Austrian Art Prize, Gelitin is a four-man Austrian art collective known for their over-the-top and humorous performances and installations. In 2011, the group hosted their own pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale.
Read MoreVienna-based friends Tobias Urban, Wolfgang Gantner, Florian Reither, and Ali Janka met at a summer camp in 1978 and went on to form Gelitin in the mid-1990s. The four friends have worked and played together ever since, driven by the shared goal of having fun.
From 1993, the group began exhibiting their humorous and unusual installations and performances overseas. In 2005, the group changed their name from Gelatin, a common animal-based ingredient, to the more distinctive Gelitin.
Gelitin's sculpture, installations, and performances combine spontaneity, playfulness, irreverent humour, and overt sexuality. Many of Gelitin's artworks involve collaboration, both with other artists and viewers.
One of Gelitin's earliest collaborative performances, Human Elevator (1999) used human-power to carefully elevate people up to the rooftop of the Pearl M. Mackey Apartments in Los Angeles. The artists arranged body builders, mechanics, and other strong individuals on a scaffolding tower to carefully pass passengers from one to the other, transporting them to the top of the building and down again.
Gelitin repeated the performance at the opening of Parallel Vienna at Alte Post, Vienna in 2016.
One of the group's best-known works is The B-Thing (2000). Performed during the group's official World Trade Center Studio Residency, the artists removed one of the windows on the 91st floor of the former World Trade Center and installed a temporary one-person balcony. This illegal feat, which was prepared and performed covertly, was documented in photographs taken from a circling helicopter, which the group later published in a book.
Alongside Gelitin's performances and interactive installations—which include installing a roller coaster in a Milan gallery—Gelitin has produced many unusual and irreverent sculptural works.
In 2003, Gelitin first exhibited the monumental Arc de Triomphe (2003) outside the Rupertinum, Salzburg. In the work, a sculpted nude male figure made of plasticine is flexibly posed to make a triumphal arch. Acting as a fully functioning fountain, a stream of water arches from the figure's genitalia into its mouth. The sculpture has been used in various exhibition installations.
In a later, similarly irreverent, sculptural installation at Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the artists presented monumental recreations of faeces, which visitors were encouraged to view while wearing exaggerated costumes of naked bodies.
In 2011, Gelitin presented its very own pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. For what they called a 'hot sculpture', the group and collaborators continually ran a wood-fired furnace in the Arsenale. Broken glass was fed into the furnace and melted down to be poured on the ground nearby, creating a fragile sculpture.
In 2019, Gelitin collaborated with British artist Liam Gillick to produce the film Stinking Dawn. Using the Kunsthalle in Vienna as a set, the film is a radical, improvised project filled with politics and dark humour. The plot follows a four-man rock band of snobbish entrepreneurs trying to survive in a capitalist 'post-leftist' dystopia, under the influences of a shady night club owner played by Gillick.
Gelitin has worked on a number of projects for public spaces. These include The Dig Cunt (2007), a performance conceived for Creative Time's 'Six Projects for New York City' in which the group dug and filled in holes on Coney Island Beach every day for seven days, sometimes with members of the public joining in. Gelitin also produced the large-scale public sculpture Die Wachauer Nase (2014), which resides next to a ferry stop on the Danube in Sankt Lorenz, Austria, and MYX (2020), permanently installed in the school yard of BRG/BORG 2 Lessinggasse in Vienna.
In 2020, Gelitin also produced a set of two-sided flags to be flown in front of the National Palace of Culture in Sofia, Bulgaria as part of the MUSIZ Foundation's flag project.
Gelitin has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Solo exhibitions include Gelitin, Tiroler Landesmuseum, Innsbruck (2021); Vorm - Fellows - Attitude, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2018); La Louvre – Paris, Musée d´Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2008); Percutaneous Delights, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (1998).
Group exhibitions include The Tip of the Iceberg, Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2019); Experience Traps, Middelheim Museum, Antwerp (2018); The New Décor, Hayward Gallery, London (2010); Junge Szene '96, Secession, Vienna (1996).
Gelitin's website can be found here, and their Instagram can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2022
