The Water Hole
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Swiss artists Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger will bring their fairy-tale world to Australia when they create a ‘water hole’ in Melbourne’s Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
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Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger create site-specific fantasias and interactive wonderlands that are an adaptation of nature through synthesis.
The pair, who have collaborated since 1997 and are known as being among the most successful of contemporary Swiss artists, bring together made and found objects to create extravagant, magical installations that are full of fantasy, allegory and beauty.
Webs of falling gardens, caves for hermetic saints, taxidermied animals and insects, glistening ponds of motor oil and flowing streams of chemicals come together to create large-scale stories, which are told with a playful charm and a strong sense of irony. Their work deals with opposites – life and death, good and evil, hope and despair.
At ACCA, they will create an artificial environment of ‘little miracles’ and zoological happenings which will culminate as a spectacular thesis on the environment: its peril and beauty. In this world premier commission, visitors will enter into a landscape of organic and inorganic matter.
Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger have exhibited throughout Europe, Brazil, Japan, Dubai and Helsinki and represented Switzerland at the 2003 Venice Biennale with the installation Falling Garden at the church in San Staë. Steiner’s previous works involved room-encompassing wall paintings reminiscent of the psychedelic patterns of the 1960s, whilst Lenzlinger’s transformed industrial materials into brightly coloured stalactite-like formations. The pair live and work in Uster, near Zurich.
“There is a marvelous exuberance in the works of Gerda and Jörg that enables the viewer to enter into a fantastic, environmental reverie,” said Juliana Engberg, ACCA’s Artistic Director. “Monumental, yet highly detailed in their parts, Gerda and Jörg encourage, through their works, the spirit of discovery and attention to the small and wonderful in the context of the bigger cosmos. Their works reference the environment and its fragile eco-system and will lead us to consider what might be a paradise lost amidst the found discarded objects of waste and excess.”
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Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger: 23 December 2008 - 1 March 2009
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank.
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday 10am-5pm, Weekends 11am–6pm. Mondays by appointment.
Tel: 03 9697 9999. Admission: Free. www.accaonline.org.au
For further media information: Katrina Hall on 03 9697 9999,
mobile 0421 153 046 or email kathall@ozemail.com.auShipwrecked at RMIT University. Day has also worked on projects at the last two Venice Biennales, including Ricky Swallow’s This Time Another Year and Callum Morton’s Valhalla.
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