We are pleased to announce the exhibition Two Melons and 1 Banana with David Renggli, which will open on 2 November at the gallery. The artist presents an expansive installation – from a work cycle comprising 2000 paper works by now – which previously has been shown at Museum Bellpark Kriens/Lucerne and also as part of the collection presentation at Migros Museum, Zurich.
David Renggli’s exhibition is characterised by an obsessive act of intervention; he stages his works in the exhibition space literally as an all-over. He mounts almost a thousand paintings in a rigorous salon hang, which occupies the gallery walls from floor to ceiling. Renggli’s act of occupation transforms the gallery into something completely different, possibly a cabinet of curiosities, or a kind of Amber Room of contemporary art. This intervention goes well beyond the usual scope of things, and indeed tests the limits of what is possible. The sheer amount of pictures also overstrains the beholder’s habits of seeing. The opulence taxes our capacity to take it in. The beholder gets lost in the viewing, and is transformed into a state that one might describe as a trance or perhaps even almost a kind of brainwashing. This staging is a celebration of the creative act which in a creative acceleration produces countless single works, all of which meet the high standards of being unique – with the difference, however, that next to each work of art we find around two thousand comparable ones. The inflationary production of unique works of art is naturally threatened by the principle of deflation, and the devaluation of both the individual picture and of the creative act. In this way David Renggli once again leads us into this wonderful state of ambivalence that connects us to both sides of a problem that remains unsolvable.
David Renggli recently had a solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bellpark Kriens and currently at the Kunsthalle St. Gallen, Switzerland. He has participated in numerous international group shows including the Swiss Institute, New York, USA, Tate Britain, London, Great Britain, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, CCAndratx, Mallorca, Spain, Kunstmuseum Bonn. Works of David Renggli are in public collections such as the Migros Museum, Zurich, Kunsthaus Zurich, Museum Bellpark Kriens and the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland.
