Pipilotti Rist

Peeping Freedom Shutters for Linda Malnati (Apollomat vertical screen PFS_A)

Peeping Freedom Shutters for Linda Malnati (Apollomat vertical screen PFS_A)

2020 Video installation, vertical flatscreen, in wooden painted window frame with shutters, integrated video player, silent Unique 195.6 x 217 x 20 cm 77 x 85 3/8 x 7 7/8 in Loop length to be communicated

USD 250,000

Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist, a pioneer of spatial video art, was born 1962 in Grabs in the Swiss Rhine Valley on the Austrian Border and has been a central figure within the international art scene since the mid-1980s.

‘There is this saying that our eyes are the windows to our soul. I love this about windows and eyes: they let us look outside while allowing a view inside too.’—Pipilotti Rist

The work title of this group of unique pieces is a reference to women rights activists who, with their fearless action and commitment, have opened a window into a new and better world. 

‘This window work is like a reversed eye to a human brain: it gives out images rather than taking them in. The shutters work like eyelids, which allows you to open or close the eye as one wishes. The video material shows internal images, imaginations and daydreams. They were conceived in relation to my new complex of works for the Geffen at the LA MOCA, where the different video installations and props display a real backyard for different neighbors without fences.’ Pipilotti Rist, June, 2020

Celebrating Basel Basel

Pipilotti Rist produced her first video, ‘I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much_’_ (1986), while still studying at the School of Design in Basel. In 1995, Art Basel introduced the platform Art Video Forum with Pipilotti Rist being the first recipient of the video art prize endowed by the main sponsor, the Swiss Bank Corporation alongside Enrique Fontanilles (later merged with Union Bank of Switzerland to become UBS).

Pipilotti Rist’s 2016 installation at Art Basel Unlimited ‘transformed me a pre-Basel person to Basel person’, recalls Saskia Spender, president of the Arshile Gorky Foundation. ‘I now often think of Pipilotti, whose point of view keeps revealing unexpected portals to the divine in my own daily life. It makes me happy to be alive.’