For American artist Paul Pfeiffer, a picture is a door into the collective consciousness. Working throughout sculpture, video, images and set up, Pfeiffer constructs his personal visible vernacular of spectacle, returning to the query, “Is the picture making us, or can we make photos?” or put merely: “Who’s utilizing who?”
The Guggenheim Bilbao Museum is presently internet hosting Pfeiffer’s largest survey exhibition in Europe, spotlighting over thirty works created over the past twenty-five years. After debuting at MOCA’s Geffen Modern in Los Angeles, Prologue to the Story of the Start of Freedom is sensible of our fixation on the spectacular, shining a light-weight on the moments and pictures that make us.
Drawing a connection between spiritual icons and the modern cult of movie star – pop stars, actors and athletes – Pfeiffer explores how a singular physique involves characterize the worldwide circulation and consumption of photos. 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2000–), a photographic sequence of NBA gamers suspended in-air, emphasizes this hyperlink as their cruciformly-fixed our bodies, captured towards a dense sea of followers, act as figures of worship in our “media-based sanctification.”
Sports activities stadiums, concert events and movies double as websites of collective reminiscence, the place societal fears and wishes reveal themselves by way of cheers and ogling eyes: Mohammad Ali and George Foreman go ghostly in The Lengthy Depend (2000–2001) as Pfeiffer digitally removes. the fighters’ our bodies out of their epic 1974 match. What’s left is an empty ring surrounded by a clamoring viewers, proposing a magnetic, meta commentary on the parable of the spectacle.
Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Start of Freedom is now on view by way of March 16.
Guggenheim Bilbao Museum
Abandoibarra Etorb., 2, Abando,
48009 Bilbo, Bizkaia, Spain
