Pipilotti Rist
Pipilotti Rist at Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelone
Varadinis Mirjam (ed.), Pipilotti Rist: Dein Speichel ist mein Raucheranzug in Ozean des Schmerzes [Pipilotti Rist : Your saliva is my diving suit in the ocean of pain], exh. cat., Kunsthaus, Zurich [26 February – 8 May, 2016], Cologne, Snoeck, 2016
→Pipilotti Rist : partit amistós sentiment electronics [friendly game, electronic feelings], exh. cat., Fondation Joan Miró, Barcelone [8 July – 1 Novembre, 2010], Barcelone, Actar, 2010
→Söll Änne, Pipilotti Rist, Cologne DuMont, 2005
Pipilotti Rist : Sip my Ocean, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1 November 2018 – 18 February, 2018
→Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest, New Museum, New York, 26 October 2016 – 15 November, 2017
→Pipilotti Rist : Augapfelmassage [eye massage], Hayward Gallery, London, 28 September, 2011 – 8 January, 2012, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim, 24 March – 24 June, 2012
Pipilotti Rist - Pixel Forest – Luma Arles Swiss video artist.
Pipilotti Rist, who was born in the Swiss canton of St Gallen, studied graphic design and photography at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna and audiovisual media at the Schule für Gestaltung in Basel. This was where she discovered the work of Ulrike Rosenbach (1943-), Joan Jonas and Peter Callas (1941-), who were to influence her future career as a video artist, with her hallmark of constant voices and music, the burlesque staging of the female body and an aesthetic steeped in saturated colours. The artist started out by creating short video clips. In her seminal I’m not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986), she sings herself hoarse in a feminist parody of John Lennon’s famous lyrics to the song “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”; her acid-coloured, sensual video Pickelporno (1992) then proved a huge success, launching the artist on the international exhibition circuit.
In 1994 she represented Switzerland at the São Paulo Biennale, alongside architects Herzog & de Meuron and sculptor Hannah Villiger (1951-1997). Three years later it was the turn of the Venice Biennale to pay tribute to her oeuvre by awarding the Premio 2000 to her installation Ever Is Over All, now in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Since 1995 she has honed her approach and her videotapes are now an integral element of highly complex installations. In Das Zimmer [The bedroom], for instance, the audience find themselves in a room of Gulliverian proportions and have to clamber on to a vast sofa in order to see the film. From 1988 to 1994 the video artist-cum-musician, who is a celebrity in Switzerland, played in an all-female rock band, Les Reines Prochaines. For two years she also acted as artistic director of Expo 02, the Swiss national exhibition. In 1997, with her sister and several friends, she founded the artistic collective Rist Sisters Corporation.
© Éditions des femmes – Antoinette Fouque, 2013
© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, 2025
