I Couldn’t Agree With You More

Pipilotti Rist (*1962) is a Swiss video artist who uses her sensual and bold video installations to challenge conventions and taboos in an entertaining, ironic and confident way. She studied advertising, illustration and photo graphics as well as audiovisual design in Vienna and Basel. From 1988 to 1994, she was a member of the musical performance group Les Reines Prochaines. She has won numerous awards and grants for her work, including the Eidgenössische Kunststipendium (twice, in 1991 and 1993), the Manor Kunstpreis St. Gallen (1994), the Kunstpreis der Stadt Zürich (2001), the Zürcher Festspielpreis (2013) and the Prix Meret Oppenheim (2014).

Many of Rist's video installations are inspired by the graphic qualities and the filmic potential of television and the associated domestic settings and atmosphere, which she translates into her exhibition spaces. According to Rist, it is its colour noise above all else that gives the medium of video its painterly quality. Hallmarks of her videos are spectacular tracking shots and an onslaught of images that are transformed and arranged in associative montages to create dreamlike sequences.

In her work, the artist explores issues such as physicality, intimacy, transformation and sexuality.
In collaboration with architect Gabrielle Hächler, Pipilotti Rist built the Rote Bar in the Hotel Castell in Zuoz in 1996.

Rist’s video installation Homo Sapiens Sapiens, which was shown in the Church of San Staë during the 51. Venice Biennale in 2005, marked her arrival in the pantheon of the international art world. The video was projected onto the vault above the nave and showed scenes from paradise before the original sin. Scenes of tropical vegetation form the backdrop for surreal, dreamlike images that tell the story of two women, human skin and the lushness of nature.

Rist not only projects her videos onto vaults but also onto floors, ceilings, furniture and curtains, thus creating all-encompassing environments that make the spectator a part of the installation.

In 2017, Rist played New York’s Times Square with her work, Open My Glade. The work was shown on sixty screens at 23:57 every day. It shows the artist herself, who appears to be pressing her nose, hands and mouth against enormous glass panels. With her twisted face and smudged make-up, Rist satirises the media’s outdated expectations of women, creating a competing narrative to the perpetually flashing ads of Times Square.

Her work entitled I Couldn’t Agree With You More (1999), which was purchased by the Walter A. Bechtler-Stiftung in 2001, shows the artist in a shopping centre and in a flat. As she films her face striding through the world, shots of nude figures, hiding from car headlights, can be seen in a green, hazy forest landscape on her forehead. Rist counters consumerism and the capitalist world of products with the unconscious drives and needs of human beings, alluding to an ideal state in which the world would have been in harmony with nature and free of conventions. The work is, so to speak, a selfie "avant la lettre", in which the inner film contrasts with the outer reality. The artist also addresses the contradictory development that the closer people live together in urban agglomerations, the more they behave to each other like "shy deer".