GRUPPENAUSSTELLUNG

‘GRUPPENAUSSTELLUNG’ is a celebration of Hauser & Wirth’s Swiss heritage through a playful presentation of over 20 artists, including Phyllida Barlow, Martin Creed, Nicole Eisenman, Isa Genzken, Rodney Graham, Richard Hamilton, Mary Heilmann, Camille Henrot, Richard Jackson, Rashid Johnson, Allison Katz, Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades, Pipilotti Rist, Dieter Roth, Björn Roth, Mika Rottenberg, Anri Sala, Cindy Sherman, Roman Signer, Lorna Simpson, Alina Szapocznikow, Franz West and David Zink Yi. The multidisciplinary exhibition is inspired by the notion of a traditional Kunsthalle, conceived as a place to showcase groundbreaking art and explore contemporary issues with a broad audience. The entire site takeover provides a platform for discovery and interaction, extending to all five galleries, outdoor sculpture and a collaborative events programme with the Roth Bar & Grill. The exhibition will evolve in three parts over the course of eight months, featuring immersive installations, solo presentations and iconic video works. Alongside the exhibition, the Education Lab takes its starting point from Mika Rottenberg’s commitment to environmentally sustainable creative practices, developed by the gallery’s green teams globally.

Artists are central to the experimental ethos of Hauser & Wirth Somerset, fostering new points of connection and inclusive approaches to experiencing art. Many of the artists featured within the exhibition, such as Martin Creed, Rashid Johnson, Allison Katz and Pipilotti Rist, have lived and worked in Bruton as part of the gallery’s longstanding residency programme, drawing inspiration from Durslade Farm, the local community and surrounding Somerset landscape. Our current artist-in-residence, Allison Katz, has created a series of new exhibition posters that will be displayed across the site. For Katz, designing posters is a way of playfully exploring protocols of typography, language and graphics, whilst addressing themes of consumption, desire and memory.

Martin Creed‘s ‘Work No. 243 HELLO’ (2000) and ‘Work No. 3159 Dancing Sock’ (2018) greet visitors as they enter the Threshing Barn. A true polymath, Creed’s work blurs the distinction between art and life, bringing the world into his work with fascinating transparency and humour. Stand out sculptures and video installations by Phyllida Barlow and Pipilotti Rist are centrepieces within the multisensory spectacle that will fill the space from floor to ceiling. A pioneer of spatial video art, Rist’s ‘香港中環吊燈 (Central Hong Kong Chandelier)’ (2021) draws on the inner and outer worlds of kaleidoscopic wonderment. Rist encourages her viewers to recline, inviting them to contemplate, and at the same time, share a collective experience with their fellow spectators. In a similar vein, Barlow’s fabric pompoms, ‘Untitled: GIG’ (2014), urge visitors to look up and observe the relationship between objects and the space that surrounds them, conceived for Hauser & Wirth Somerset’s inaugural exhibition in 2014. Richard Jackson‘s neon signs flash with evocative puns and statements that engage with the artist’s interest in hunting culture and its vernacular, seen in works such as ‘HOTSHOT’ (2022), ‘BIG FAT PIG’ (2010) and ‘BARE BEAR’ (2008). Jackson’s work offers an ironic comment on the heroic pretensions associated with the medium, with works such as ‘Art Fair Party’ (2014), a direct and humorous critique of the structure of the commercial art world. Jason Rhoades‘ neon installations, such as ‘Shelf (Mutton Chops) with Unpainted Donkey’ (2003), continue to signpost social commentary whilst pushing against the safety of cultural conventions. The unbridled, brazenly maximalist works attract, repulse and mystify the viewer, igniting questions that only multiply with prolonged exposure.

The Workshop and Pigsty Galleries will transform to showcase Mika Rottenberg‘s seminal video installation, ‘Cosmic Generator (Loaded #2)’ (2017 – 2018), on view for the first time in the UK. This surreal and subversive video work explores globalisation, labour and spectacle, and is perhaps the best introduction to Rottenberg’s oeuvre. Filmed on-site at a market for plastic goods in Yiwu, China and in Mexicali, Mexico, a town near the US border, which is home to a large Chinese population, the video installation forms connections among seemingly disparate geographies. The video mixes scenes of real locations with elements of magical realism shot in a studio. Slow pans over vendors sitting in their booths full of cheap, glittering, rainbow wares are juxtaposed with Chinese restaurants in the Mexican border city, where miniature besuited corporate clones wriggle on beds of cilantro/coriander. A tunnel connects the two locations on opposite sides of the world — an analogue version of the digital networks that move capital around the world at the touch of a button. The distinction between fantasy architecture and real space is further blurred by a fabricated tunnel surrounding the video installation, through which viewers enter the space, and a curtain of coloured tinsel through which they exit. By weaving fact and fiction together, Rottenberg highlights the inherent beauty and absurdity of our contemporary existence.

The ‘Kino / Cinema’ will present a changing weekly schedule of important video and film works over the course of the exhibition, featuring Martin Creed, Nicole Eisenman, Rodney Graham, Camille Henrot, Richard Jackson, Rashid Johnson, Paul McCarthy, Mika Rottenberg, Pipilotti Rist, Anri Sala and Lorna Simpson. Pipilotti Rist‘s video works ‘I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much’ (1986) and ‘(Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler’ <(Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes> (1988) launch the programme this June. Both early works appropriate and subvert the language of music videos, with the latter juxtaposing images of Rist collapsing to the ground with bursts of wildly scrambled electronic distortion. At the time, Rist was seen to be making a feminist and ironic comment on the representations of women in 1980s popular culture. Further video works on view include Paul McCarthy‘s ‘cisuM fo dnuoS ehT/The Sound of Music’ (2008), an upside down and reverse projection of the iconic Hollywood musical ‘The Sound of Music’ (1965), Lorna Simpson‘s ‘Call Waiting’ (1997), a web of open-ended stories and conversations between various speakers, Rashid Johnson‘s ‘The New Black Yoga’ (2011), a visual poem about improvisation and the evolution of persona, and Camille Henrot‘s ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013), an ambitious video that attempts to tell the story of the universe’s creation for which she received the Silver Lion at 55th Venice Biennale.

The Bourgeois Gallery opens with a solo presentation of Paul McCarthy‘s ‘White Snow Dwarves’ (2010 – 2012), on loan from the Ursula Hauser Collection, between June and August. These fantastical works, alongside drawings from the same theme, are the result of McCarthy’s exploration and subversion of the famous 19th-century German folk tale ‘Snow White (Schneewittchen)’ and the modern interpretation in Disney’s beloved animated film ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ (1937). This theme has pervaded McCarthy’s practice since 2009, resurfacing and evolving through various iterations and media, including drawing, sculpture, performance and video, it culminated in the epic installation ‘WS’, presented at the Park Avenue Armory, New York in 2013. Merging the sinister undercurrents of the original fairy tale with Disney’s unstintingly commercialised version, Snow White is used as both a vehicle and a cultural touchstone to examine a darker underpinning of consumerism as an initiation of innocence into a culture of desire and fetishism. Following McCarthy’s presentation, the Bourgeois Gallery will host a collection of works by artist Franz West from September until October, followed by solo works by Hauser & Wirth artists from November.

A new outdoor sculpture presentation will be interspersed throughout the site, including works by Camille Henrot, Mika Rottenberg, Franz West and David Zink Yi. Camille Henrot‘s bronze sculptures emphasize the delicate equilibrium between thing and object, and the mutual generation of bodies, words and shapes. Henrot’s ‘Family of Men’ (2022), on view in the farmyard in front of Durslade Farmhouse, offers an image of the crushing power of authority and ancestry, with the figures squashing each other in their quest for elevation and growth. Henrot’s ‘Gargoyles’ (2022) will be positioned amongst the flora and fauna of Oudolf Field. Henrot’s hybrid figures — neither human, animal nor plant — exist in a state of perpetual becoming. Franz West‘s ‘Étude de couleur’ (1991/1997) highlights the artist’s playful commentary on the world and people around him, disrupting all preconceptions of what art viewing should be. David Zink Yi‘s stainless steel replicas of ‘Washingtonia robusta’ palms continue to experiment with perspective and idealised artificiality, nature and architecture. A new outdoor work by Mika Rottenberg will be unveiled later in the exhibition, extending the circular economic and production systems she has been developing for decades, now going beyond metaphor to enact these systems physically in sculpture.

Inspired by artist, Mika Rottenberg, the Education Lab will provide a dynamic platform for collaboration across the gallery’s green teams globally. Through the Education Lab, our internal teams will have a forum to share knowledge and display new ideas in relation to the creative use and reuse of materials within our gallery ecosystem. Visitors are invited to take part in the activation of the space itself, to engage with themes of environmental sustainability, and to be inspired to collaborate and to create change in this area.

Coinciding with the exhibition there will be an extensive site-wide events programme, connecting art with food, landscape, learning and community. The wide variety of events will include talks, workshops, tours, screenings and guest chef dinners, as well as our annual learning initiatives Bristol Old Vic Youth Theatre Summer School, Architecture Summer School and International Curatorial Residency, all taking their inspiration from the themes explored within the exhibition.

Gallery hours Tue-Sun 10 am – 4 pm

Exhibition Duration 03 June 2023 – 01 January 2024

www.hauserwirth.com

Location:
Hauser & Wirth Somerset
Durslade Farm / Dropping Lane
BA10 0NL Bruton / Somerset
United Kingdom