RIST ANALYSIS

PIPILOTTI RIST goes about projecting her artistic vision by gambling and being brave, writes MARGOT MOTTAZ

THE SUMMER MONTHS, for most, tend to be when the burst of energy from spring is drained by warm sunshine. Not so for Pipilotti Rist, who is at work in her Zurich studio on a hot Tuesday morning midway through August. Rist is putting the final touches to two endeavours, one in Switzerland and the other in Australia. Rest is a luxury for an artist of her stature.

She counts more than 40 solo exhibitions in the past decade alone, including a recordbreaking retrospective at the New Museum in New York last year.

Rist was born in 1962 in Grabs, a village in Eastern Switzerland. After studying commercial art, illustration and photography in Vienna, and video in Basel, freelance jobs followed. Aged 22, the visual artist held her first solo show in Vienna. I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much in 1986, Pickelporno in 1992 and Ever is Over All in 1997 were works that would eventually make her as one of the most significant figures in the world of art.

Rist is a performer, a singer and poet, as well as a visual artist. In playing these roles she gives equal weight to each in her new media installations. Her work includes her early single-channel videos, shown on monitors, to her more recent immersive projections onto walls, ceilings and floors.

Rist's studio is in the basement of a building