WORKS OF ART

PETER KOGLER
 

1959, lives and works in Vienna
In front of Auditorium Ivan Pictet

Peter Kogler is an Austrian artist who first gained attention on the international art scene in the 1980s. His work adopts an approach based on architecture, cinema and the new digital media, as well as the major art trends of Minimalism and Pop Art.Using the computer to create his motifs, Kogler reinvents the idea of the fresco and decorative wallpaper in a more global architectural perspective. It is in fact a profound blend of inspirations drawn from the corporal and figurative domains that gives rise to the artist’s motifs, which are often quite clear in meaning and immediately recognisable, such as ants, pipes or the brain.Here, as part of the project for Maison de la paix, the artist has chosen the honeycomb as his motif. This group of hexagonal cavities or energy cells stretches, warps, expands or curls up according to the forces exerted on the structure – a network that goes on infinitely, plunging the viewer into an unsettling visual experience that seems to exist between real and fictional space. The forms produced, now convex, now concave, offer a vision in three dimensions whose dense fabric looks like an undulating weft of coiling lines.Covering the floor and walls of the same structure, Kogler’s spatial intervention fascinates thanks to the new identity it bestows on the site, shifting the borders between a real space and an immaterial architecture. Introducing a slight destabilisation into the physical perception of a place reminds anyone who ventures there of just how much each of us is a protagonist in a world in motion.

MONIKA SOSNOWSKA

1972, lives and works in Warsaw 
In front of the Institute’s reception

A fragment of the metal structure from the façade of a modernist Polish building of the 1960s has been turned into a novel and surprising form. Once reworked by the Polish artist Monika Sosnowska, this relic of the ideal architecture of classic modernism is transformed into an object that is freely suspended in space, nearly negating its 750 kg of mass through its sheer grace, looking like a skin or an elegant fabric that has an almost sensual aspect. 

The new life of this structure, which speaks a language of the past, coexists and resonates with the contemporary building that is home to Maison de la paix, offering not only a surprising spatial sensibility but also a possible dialogue on the state of architecture and culture in general.

Springing from the deconstruction of a past world, Sosnowska’s Façade conveys as well the suggestion of a new potential construction.

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

1955, lives and works in Johannesburg 
Auditorium Ivan Pictet

“I am interested in a political art, that is to say, an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings – an art that keeps optimism in check and nihilism at bay.”

William Kentridge is an actively engaged and internationally recognised South African artist. His favourite subjects are history and its evolution, the systems of power and authority, memory and forgetting.
Clearly at home in the Ivan Pictet auditorium, these two monumental drawings introduce a subtle universe, both organic and literary, embracing the history of Chinese authoritarian regimes but apprehended from the point of view of a contemporary artist from another continent.

At first glance, they present themselves to the spectator as very beautiful ink drawings, representing plants. But the spectator’s delight rapidly gives way to questioning the crossing of genres between drawing, text and medium, in this case book pages. By decomposing the piece, juxtaposing pages in the manner of a mosaic, Kentridge affixes his work to existing knowledge in the seeming form of a Chinese encyclopaedia, a collection of facts and knowledge existing within a precise temporality. The artist portrays well-known motifs from erudite 14th-century paintings of vegetation and vegetables simultaneously with elements from scripture and fragments of sentences in English which oscillate between ancient parables and parodies of Chinese Cultural Revolution political slogans.

In LONG, LONG, LONG LIVE THE 4 MODERNISATIONS, the artist refers to Mao Zedong’s “modernisation” campaign, the Great Leap Forward, in which he gathered the Chinese in a struggle against the “Four Pests” – flies, mosquitos, rats and sparrows – which composed, according to the Maoist regime, a threat to the country’s crops. The campaign launched to eradicate millions of sparrows resulted notably in an invasion of crickets that contributed to the greatest famine known in China between 1958 and 1961. The other slogans, such as “HARMONISE THE SOUP”, “GLOWING WITH HEALTH & RADIATING VIGOUR”, “STRUGGLE, CRITICISE, TRANSFORM”, simultaneously contain all the paradoxes of revolutionary optimism and the ironical criticism of the Maoist authoritarian system’s setbacks and its utopian dream.

Like an echo, GOOD VEGETABLES & EXEMPLARY DEEDS – LET US EACH DEDUCT 5 YEARS welcomes, like a semitransparent spectre, a rescued bird, while in the opposite angle the text “EAT BITTERNESS” resonates, bitterly evoking the scale of the famine.