Tobias Spichtig: This Is What Happened In The Jungle

TOBIAS SPICHTIG This Is What Happened In The Jungle November 22, 2013 – January 5, 2014 | 195 Chrystie St, NY

Eleven Rivington is delighted to announce the first solo show in New York by Swiss artist Tobias Spichtig, on view at the gallery’s 195 Chrystie Street location from November 22, 2013 – January 5, 2014. The exhibition is organized by Christian Wirtz.

Tobias Spichtig’s eponymous photographs present shots taken at the zoo, in an artificial recreation of the rain forest.  They show what we expect when we talk about a rain forest: jungle. Apart from that, absolutely nothing is happening in these views – and if something were to happen, we probably wouldn’t see it.  In Spichtig’s large compositions on canvas, executed in printing inks, the print medium is stripped of its function.  These paintings become prints without a code that recall watercolors. Spichtig creates an accident that purports to be natural but instead is artificial. The ‘accident’ becomes an act of generating an image, which can also be understood as a primitive concept.

The artist’s practice is fuelled by its continuous circulation of media, formats, and materials. The constant within his work is an aesthetic claim upon form.  His conscious awareness of the generation of images goes back to the aesthetic understanding that characterizes today’s visual culture: the overlaying of information, and its simultaneous, multiple representations.  Spichtig’s concept thereby becomes a concentrated potentiality that induces, in its precision, new avenues of thought and jokes. And that is exactly what happens in the exhibition, the city, the jungle, and indeed in our thinking: something like reality is generated by chance.

Tobias Spichtig was born in 1982 in Lucerne, Switzerland.  He was educated at Zurcher Hochschule der Kunste, Zurich, Switzerland (BFA & MFA) and currently lives and works in Zurich.   Previous solo exhibitions include The blue, the red, the green, the cuboid and the pyramid, Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Germany (2012); Sappy / UFO Romantics / Slave to Love, Van Horbourg, Switzerland (2011).  Group shows include Ludlow 38, New York (2013); Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland (2013); Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland (2011/12), and Witte de With, Holland (2011), among others.