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PRESS RELEASE
Robert Kinmont. WAIT
June 8 – July 28, 2012
Pfingstweidstrasse 23 / Welti-Furrer Areal, 8005 Zürich
Opening reception: Saturday June 9, 4 – 7 pm
“I accept art to be evidence of human existence. I have found that we are able to make a very small amount of all the pieces we think about. So it's a little bit like leaving footprints just occasionally. And the footprints we leave have been chosen. It is very telling but never conclusive.”
Robert Kinmont
RaebervonStenglin is delighted to present Robert Kinmont’s first exhibition in Europe. WAIT will feature early and recent pieces by the American conceptual artist, spanning from the late ’60s until the present day. The works bridge a 30 year hiatus in which Kinmont, having achieved some success and recognition, left his art career to raise his family, practice Buddhist meditation, set up an art school and then work as a carpenter two decades before returning to art. For Kinmont, art is secondary to living, yet is all the richer for that. His practice countenances attitudes and subtleties rarely seen in contemporary art: an ambivalence towards making things and an acceptance also that much that is worth communicating may go unseen.
Kinmont’s art is extraordinarily grounded. His best-known work, familiar as an iconic photograph in Lucy Lippard’s ‘Six Years’ book, is his 1969 series 8 Natural Handstands, which show him doing handstands outdoors in diminishing contexts, the edge of a cliff, boulders, riverbed, forests and desert. Earth features again and again in his works: in his photographic series My Favorite Dirt Roads (1969/2008), which depicts exactly what it says; in the sculptural installation Home Sweet Home (2010–2011), which features three bed-sized wooden boxes filled with soil and laid with pillows; and even as a vital ingredient hidden from view, as in the hollowed out cottonwood logs Kinmont has made filled with such existential matter as dirt and children’s toys — all on show at RaebervonStenglin. These understated works relate the artist in a fundamental way to his environment and draw directly from his experiences. Thus ordinary things become surprisingly meaningful, appreciable precisely for being frequently used, as in the deadpan series Just about the right size (1970–2008), which sees Kinmont photographed straight on holding an everyday object — a rock, a bouquet of flowers, a ball, his own shoe, for instance — eschewing grandeur for art on a human scale.
For RaebervonStenglin, Kinmont is presenting a refrigerated text piece, STANDING HERE IN FRONT OF THESE MOUNTAINS IS SUCCESS, written in cursive with quarter inch copper tubing, which will become coated with ice. Requiring refrigerant equipment to be realised, the work summons sublime nature in order to celebrate modest human achievement. Rather than compete against each other, the two are bound together in Kinmont’s art, which with its philosophy of balance and understatement, nonetheless conveys exhilaration.
