Hasta La Ideas

Larger-than-life video installations take over two Spanish galleries in Pipilotti Rist’s latest solo show

Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist‘s mesmerizing images often consume entire rooms, but at any scale her masterful manipulations of color, scale, and pacing draw viewers into dreamlike worlds. Her latest solo exhibition Friendly Game—Electronic Feelings, currently on display at two galleries in Barcelona and the nearby town of Girona, features 13 of her video works—including her site-specific work “Temps lliure,” which tries to “clean the visitors’ brains and guide them.”

Winner of the 2009 Joan Miró prize, Rist’s work balances subject matter that ranges from gruesome to banal with choices tending to luridly bright color combos, extreme close-ups, and other seductive techniques cribbed from her former career in advertising.

In addition to the videos on exhibit, “Doble llum,” also created specifically for the exhibit at Fundació Joan Miró, consists of a Rist video projected onto Miró’s 1968 sculpture “Femme.”

A book accompanying the exhibit (which runs through 1 November 2010) includes photographs of her works and poems, as well as essays by Han Nefkens and others.