PRESS RELEASE
Kilian Rüthemann. Target as Frontside
April 14th – May 28th, 2011
Pfingstweidstrasse 23 / Welti-Furrer Areal, 8005 Zürich
Opening reception: Friday, April 15th from 6 - 9 pm
RaebervonStenglin is proud to present Target as Frontside, an exhibition of new work by Kilian Rüthemann. The Swiss artist makes sculptures using simple substances such as salt, sugar, bitumen or cement, interacting these with the fabric of the building that support them — the walls and floor of a gallery, its steps, windows and lighting, for instance — to form architectural interventions that alter the function of their known ingredients, allowing structural properties to expound their own logic.
Rüthemann’s works are frequently made in situ, directly responding to the environment they will be shown in and lasting no longer than the duration of their exhibition. Each is the embodiment of a single act whose forthrightness combines elegance with absurdity. Despite their strict formalism and structural experimentation the nature of his inquiry is philosophical, its results poetic. Past works include skylights reconfigured to form a giant X formation running from ceiling to floor (X, 2009, Kunsthaus Glarus); a segment of a gallery’s parquet floor lifted and laid next to the hole it had left to form two side by side arrows, pointing to something made out of nothing (Untitled, 2009); and crosses drawn in cement across each of a gallery’s walls at Kunstmuseum Basel, (Untitled, 2010) — the ragged unevenness of the action contrasting with the conceptual purity of the gesture, whilst simultaneously damaging and drawing attention to the museum’s architecture.
Target as Frontside takes its title from a text by the electronic music composer and theorist Dick Raaijmakers, whose scientific yet poetic thought experiments profoundly influence Rüthemann’s work. The phrase comes from Raaijmakers 1984 work METHOD and summarises an attempt to understand the way in which humans interact with the world through their use of tools, arriving at the conclusion that the person who ‘moves’ a thing or thought toward a ‘target’ can only ever see it from its frontside, for ‘… it will turn with him and follow him constantly with its frontside: like a lion following the hunter with his head.’ The works at RaebervonStenglin explore this relationship between movement and agency, allowing simple actions to invoke narratives of dissolution and decay thus testifying to the transience of all things. Two ‘sheets’ of white cement will lie on top of each other in the front room of the gallery, their exact dimensions relaxed into a soft formation due to the ways in which they have been released from their casts. In the back gallery another work will present approximately 180 fluorescent bulbs affixed to a wall and then smashed, forming an incandescent monument to fragility. Through their use of individual components to create injured shapes, such works convey the delicacy of relationships, sublimating functionality into feeling.
Kilian Rüthemann was born in St. Gallen in 1979. He studied stone sculpting at Zuzwil, St. Gallen (1997–2001) and Fine Arts and Media Art at Academy of Art and Design, Basel (2002–2005). His solo exhibitions include Walking Distance, Künstlerhaus Bremen (2010); Attacca, Manor Kunstpreis Basel, Museum fur Gegenwartskunst Basel (2010); Double Rich, Instituto Svizzero di Roma (2009); and Sooner Rather than Later, Kunsthaus Glarus (2009). His numerous group exhibitions include Displaced Fracures, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich (2010); 5. Berlin Biennale für zeitgenössische Kunst, Berlin (2008); and Poor Thing, Kunsthalle Basel (2007).
