We are pleased to announce the exhibition ‘Drums, Please!’ with works by David Renggli, which will open on 27 April for the Gallery Weekend. The exhibition brings together two areas of David Renggli’s oeuvre: painting and sculpture.
In the exhibition ‘Drums, Please!’, David Renggli is concerned with playing with the beholders’ perception. He is showing metal sculptures from a new series and colourful reverse glass paintings. The gleaming sculptures are inspired equally by the poses of fashion models in magazines and by antique sculptures. This is where Renggli finds the bodies that he transforms using an abstract formal vocabulary. He contrasts the artificial and trivial contemporary body language with the body language of antiquity. At first, the hard-edged rods seem abstract and fragmented, but from certain perspectives, a body-like figure emerges which in its reduction is a perfect sculpture. Despite the limitation of form, a sensuality ensues that is composed anew from different perspectives. Thus, it is for the beholder to engage in an active process so as to read the human body und imagine the missing body parts.
In the large-format series of paintings I Love You, paint is applied to the back of glass panels, which leads to a strong luminance. The physical presence of this luminance is stronger than the rational mind. Here, the artist’s concern is to reveal the discrepancy between an intellectual discourse and the claims made of modern art on the one hand, and a physical truth that is determined by beauty on the other. In addition to showing this, Renggli is also interested in honesty and redundancy. This is also how the title of this series is to be understood: while the phrase ‘I love you’ is used in an inflationary manner by a majority of people, and thus loses significance, when it is meant honestly, it is the untouchable very essence of what is beautiful, true, and good. In this way, Renggli applies the principle of reversal by taking the ‘beauty’ of abstract painting to such extremes that it almost threatens to slip into pure superficiality. The inflationary quality of abstract painting that operates with a gestural brush flow and saturated colours is opposed to the serious aspirations and claims of beauty.
Works by David Renggli have been exhibited at numerous international institutions, among them Tate Britain, Migros Museum in Zurich, Kunsthaus Zürich, Swiss Institute New York, Kunstmuseum Bonn, and Kunstmuseum St. Gallen. Currently, the Museum Museum Bellpark, Kriens/Lucerne is showing David Renggli – The Charm of Ignorance.
