Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist

63 (1962-06-21)
Grabs, Switzerland

Pipilotti Rist is a visual artist. She is best known for creating experiential video art and installation art that often portray self-portraits and singing. Her work is often described as surreal, intimate, abstract art, having a preoccupation with the female body.

Most Known for...

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Pepperminta 2009 (6.3)

Pepperminta is an anarchist of the imagination. She lives in a futuristic rainbow villa and according to her own rules. Colors are the young woman's best friends and strawberries are her pets. She knows the most amazing remedies to free people of their fears. Pepperminta's wish is for everyone to see the world in her favorite colors. Werwen, a young plump and shy man yet whose sex appeal Pepperminta finds highly attractive, and the beautiful Edna, who talks to tulips, join her on her passionate mission. These three musketeers of a different kind set out to fight for a more humane world. Wherever the gang appears, everything is turned upside down and people's lives are transformed in the most miraculous and wondrous of ways.
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I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much 1986 (3.857)

This video work was made while Rist was still an art student at the School of Design in Basel, Switzerland. It was produced in an unlimited edition and is intended to be shown on a domestic-style monitor, although it may also be displayed as a projection with special permission from the artist. The video depicts the artist, an attractive young woman dancing manically around the room while repeatedly singing ‘I’m not the girl who misses much’. The phrase is an adaptation of the first line of the Beatles song ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun'. Referring to her childhood Rist has said, ‘In my village in Switzerland I had a small window on the art world through the mass media; through John Lennon/Yoko Ono I moved from pop music to contemporary art. In return, I will always be grateful to popular culture’ (quoted in ‘I rist, you rist, she rists, he rists, we rist, you rist, they rist, tourist: Hans Ulrich Obrist in Conversation with Pipilotti Rist’, Pipilotti Rist, p.16).
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Pickelporno 1992 (5.7)

In this visual evocation of sex and sexuality, a man and woman stage an elaborately choreographed courtship ritual, edited with Rist's usual attention to the syntax of mass media. As a driving bass sample plays, a surveillance camera makes low-flying journeys across the bodies of the actors, yielding images at once familiar and distancing, a strategy in keeping with Rist's desire "to propose images of sexuality rather than to analyze the pros and the cons of pornography."