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Lot Essay
This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
With its genie-like liquor-bottled video images and its retro-futuristic 1950s styling, Pipilotti Rist's Bar is an intriguing monument to the self-indulgent pleasures of modern consumerist culture and the decadent and almost baroque art of contemporary packaging. Presenting a fancy ensemble of drinks accoutrements that includes engraved Napoleon Brandy glasses, a silver apple-shaped ice bucket and a glass of florescent green swizzle sticks, Rist's spaceship-like Bar invokes a world of artifice and over-indulgence. Executed in 1999 Bar formed an important part of one of Rist's most celebrated installations, Himalaya's Sister's Living Room, which itself formed the mainstay of Rist's large-scale exhibition at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York in May 2000. Bar stood in the corner of, Himalaya's Sister's Living Room, a room, not unlike Richard Hamilton's 1956, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing, packed with the nostalgia and futuristic kitsch of 1950's furniture and compressed with a vast array of competing imagery, both tangible, real, artificial, illusory and video. Both invoking and articulating the fetishism of contemporary culture with its emphasis on the faux desirability and collectibility of things, this important installation, now owned by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington powerfully conveys a sense of the artifice and unreality of all imagery both abstract and iconographic. Bar, which Rist also exhibited as a solo work at the Musée de l'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in the autumn of 1999, is a potent and singular symbol of the baroque-like overkill of imagery that colours contemporary culture and our tendency to fetishize even the simplest of everyday objects and tools.
With its genie-like liquor-bottled video images and its retro-futuristic 1950s styling, Pipilotti Rist's Bar is an intriguing monument to the self-indulgent pleasures of modern consumerist culture and the decadent and almost baroque art of contemporary packaging. Presenting a fancy ensemble of drinks accoutrements that includes engraved Napoleon Brandy glasses, a silver apple-shaped ice bucket and a glass of florescent green swizzle sticks, Rist's spaceship-like Bar invokes a world of artifice and over-indulgence. Executed in 1999 Bar formed an important part of one of Rist's most celebrated installations, Himalaya's Sister's Living Room, which itself formed the mainstay of Rist's large-scale exhibition at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York in May 2000. Bar stood in the corner of, Himalaya's Sister's Living Room, a room, not unlike Richard Hamilton's 1956, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing, packed with the nostalgia and futuristic kitsch of 1950's furniture and compressed with a vast array of competing imagery, both tangible, real, artificial, illusory and video. Both invoking and articulating the fetishism of contemporary culture with its emphasis on the faux desirability and collectibility of things, this important installation, now owned by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington powerfully conveys a sense of the artifice and unreality of all imagery both abstract and iconographic. Bar, which Rist also exhibited as a solo work at the Musée de l'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in the autumn of 1999, is a potent and singular symbol of the baroque-like overkill of imagery that colours contemporary culture and our tendency to fetishize even the simplest of everyday objects and tools.