Name: GIL PELLATON – Hennissement
Start: 2022-01-28T00:00:00+01:00
End: 2022-03-27T23:59:59+02:00
Location: Kunsthaus Biel

Diese Veranstaltung hat bereits stattgefunden.

GIL PELLATON – Hennissement

28 January 2022 – 27 March 2022

GIL PELLATON

Hennissement – Manor Art Award

28.1.-27.3.2022

The narratives of Gil Pellaton (*1982, CH, Biel) are about strange, fragmentary occurrences. For his objects and installations, he often uses organic materials such as tiger balm and coriander or a mixture of turmeric and bone glue. Their effect unfolds not only visually, but also through specific smells and their haptics. Pellaton’s independent artistic vocabulary is inspired by cultural history as well as the symbolic charge of the materials and their reinterpretation in the art context.

Hennissement is the continuation of an ongoing work that seeks to develop a universe independent of the prevailing frames of reference. The deliciously mysterious works develop narratives that remain incomplete and open up a world of poetry in which feelings can improvise endlessly. It is the artist’s attempt to invent a language without words and concepts, where yapping, neighing and barking form our new grammar. The exhibition shows existing works as well as several new ones inspired by the dialogue between the artist and the author Elise Lammer. In addition, a poetic text has been created for the accompanying publication, which is at the same time inseparably linked to the exhibition concept.

In this, his largest solo exhibition to date, Gil Pellaton aims to create not a coherent, unified scenario, but rather a parcours of fragmentary situations, developed from the repetition of motifs and unfolding associations. At the beginning of the exhibition we are confronted by a bent wooden pole which guides us along the corridor and into the first room of Parkett 2 in the old building. The watch suspended mysteriously on the end of the pole reappears later in one of the two videos. These are projected on a large band of fabric that runs between the rooms, so that although each video occupies its own space, there is nonetheless a physical as well as an emotional connection between the two women in a boat on a sunny day and the dancing horses. The indeterminate and enigmatic nature of these external worlds shifts in the last two rooms to the intimate and smaller scale. Pairs or groups of sculptures made from a variety of natural and manufactured materials suggest both ancient ritual and contemporary drama. In the polished, uneven aluminium surfaces of the hand mirrors, for example, we see light as well as our own distorted reflection.

In recent years Pellaton has developed an idiosyncratic language through his use of organic substances, such as tiger balm, coriander or turmeric. Removing these from their original function, he draws on the symbolic power of the materials and their potential for narrative in an artistic context. The passage to the Salle Poma presents a series of relief-like objects made of turmeric mixed with bone glue, in which the spice’s colour and scent informs the reading of the leaf-like pattern inscribed on the surface. These works continue in a different configuration in the Salle Poma, nestled within long lengths of fabric suspended from two tall steel tubes. A radically minimalist gesture in the monumental space, this new work situates the artist’s exploration of natural substances as sculptural materials within the specific context of the architecture. In combining existing and new work in the parcours from the classical building to the stringent minimalism of the extension, Pellaton plays with scales and configurations, creating a non-linear experience, as new constellations revise earlier readings.

Gil Pellaton lives and works in Biel/Bienne, where he studied at the Schule für Gestaltung from 2002 to 2005. From 2015 to 2017 he studied at the Institut Kunst HGK FNHW in Basel for a Master in Fine Arts. In 2010 he was awarded the Kiefer Hablitzel | Göhner Art Prize and in 2020 for the Louise Aeschlimann and Margareta Corti Scholarship.

Jury members

Rolando Bassetti, director Centre d’art Contemporain, Yverdon-les-Bains

Esther van der Bie, artist, Biel/Bienne

Kathleen Bühler, chief curator Kunstmuseum Bern

Pierre-André Maus, CEO Maus Frères SA, Genf

Chantal Prod’Hom, director mudac, Lausanne

[Proposals for candidates: Felicity Lunn, director Kunsthaus Pasquart]

Curator of the exhibition

Felicity Lunn, director Kunsthaus Pasquart

Publication accompanying the exhibition

A richly illustrated publication with a text by Elise Lammer will be published by Verlag für moderne Kunst (FR / DT / ENG) to accompany the exhibition.