Raphael Hefti: Salutary Failures / Kunsthalle Basel

“Salutary Failures” is the title of Swiss artist Raphael Hefti’s largest solo show to date. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel features several new, site-specific bodies of work. Hefti presents multi-ton, extreme-aged, and high voltage works across the five downstairs spaces of Kunsthalle Basel.

Raphael Hefti: Salutary Failures / Kunsthalle Basel. Basel (Switzerland), October 9, 2020.

0:00 Intro
0:18 The Sun is the Tongue, the Shadow is the Language, 2020
1:26 Polycrystalline Horticulture, 2020
2:04 Dr. Sattler: So, what are you thinking? Dr. Grant: We’re out of a job. Dr. Malcom: Don’t you mean extinct?, 2020
2:45 RHE series, 2020
3:48 Message Not Sent, 2020

Excerpt from the exhibition text:

Size, Raphael Hefti would tell you, matters. Not that all of his art is necessarily big, or that he considers monumentality to be superior to the intimacy of small things. But in an age in which nearly everything can be seen on social media – instantaneously, at a single glance, and everywhere, unmoored from its physical site – he believes it to be essential for art to surpass what can easily be captured on a digital screen. And he believes that it is crucial to provoke precisely the sort of wonder and discomfort that the screen cannot convey. He is, you might say, in search of the sublime; he finds it in ordinary phenomena, both natural and industrially-made, and in the sorts of outcomes that can only arise from the efforts of highly skilled craftspeople, impelled by the artist to push materials and techniques to their very limits and, at times, beyond.

The results of this approach can be encountered in Hefti’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, the largest institutional show of his work to date. It comprises more than 27 tons of black sand pressed into an array of daunting, irregular monoliths (some featuring channels doused with molten aluminum, some bearing lava-like swellings); a swath of 600 kilos of liquefied and then hardened bismuth, glistening like an iridescent panoramic landscape; multiple beams made from the metal alloy X6CrNiTi18-10 subjected – over the course of eight years – to extreme temperature changes that simulate around 5,000 years of natural aging (as an industrial ventilation system circulates the air around both beams and visitors, unsettling viewing conditions); more than a dozen abstract “paintings” on differently sized aluminum sheets produced through a process of semi-controlled corrosion caused by repeated exposure to acid and pigment baths; and 15 four-meter-long glass vials that enclose various noble gases, electrified to flicker spectrally. Such is a more or less matter-of-fact way to describe the five newly produced and recent bodies of work divided across the spaces of the exhibition Salutary Failures, pulling focus on their numbers: the sheer scale or weight or temporal measure they imply.

#raphaelhefti #salutaryfailures #kunsthallebasel #basel

More videos on contemporary art, design, architecture:
http://vernissage.tv

Connect:
http://www.facebook.com/vernissagetv
http://twitter.com/vernissagetv

Browse our Archive:
http://vernissage.tv/archive/posts/

Find Artists, Designers, Architects:
http://vernissage.tv/archive/artists/

Art TV pioneer Vernissage TV provides you with an authentic insight into the world of contemporary fine arts, design and architecture. With its two main series "No Comment" and "Interviews", art tv channel VernissageTV attends opening receptions of exhibitions worldwide, interviews artists, designers, architects. VTV provides art lovers with news, reports and features from the international art scene. VernissageTV: the window to the art world. Das Fenster zur Kunstwelt. La fenêtre sur le monde de l'art. A janela para o mundo da arte. La ventana al mundo del arte. نافذة على عالم الفن. 到艺术世界的窗口。Окно в мир искусства. Since 2005.

Видео Raphael Hefti: Salutary Failures / Kunsthalle Basel канала VernissageTV