La Forêt

From 5 April to 19 May 2013 Swiss artists Lutz & Guggisberg will be at La Criée with a group of mostly new works bearing the umbrella title La Forêt. With this exhibition the duo invite the spectator on a stroll through a landscape that makes play with the forest and its narrative and symbolic potential.

For over fifteen years now Lutz & Guggisberg have been producing a protean body of work that combines enormous freedom of expression with a range of media including sculpture, painting, video, photography, sound and, more recently, performance. In their exhibitions they offer mises en scène of their different pieces, often resorting to self-quotation as they invent networks of meaning within their own creative system. The viewer finds himself in a singular world in which reality markers – materials, places – vie with signs from the imaginary domain: abstract and anthropomorphic sculptures, narratives in negative form in photographs, etc. Although well known on the Swiss and international scenes – they will be at MUDAM in Luxembourg after their exhibition in Rennes – they have rarely shown in France. This makes the La Criée exhibition an excellent opportunity for making them known to the French public. Lutz & Guggisberg are storytellers who «enchant» reality. For Rennes they have come up with La Forêt, an installation offering both a landscape and a story. Their forest is an inhabited one, home to a benign bestiary of unlikely birds, platoons of ants, and sea creatures. In this jubilant space humour is omnipresent, as discovery follows discovery, from a dust farm on the floor to a large-scale mobile that serves as a forest canopy. Yet there is, too, a hint of disquiet, which surfaces notably in the dark colours covering the walls. Designed specially for the La Criée space, the exhibition is in large part made up of new works in which we find familiar features of the artists’ vocabulary: theatres of objects, collections, found items, assemblages, etc. These works also allow for more detailed exploration of such themes as the artists’ relationship with painting: the traditions of abstraction and the fresco are approached here with hilarious detachment. Two series of photographs, Stumps and Hole in the Mirror take us down paths sometimes dark and intriguing, sometimes luminously witty, along which the beginnings of an open-ended narrative take shape. Counterpointing these images, sculptures turning wood, plaster, paper and dust into weird yet familiar shapes inhabit the exhibition space from floor to ceiling. In the small room the video installation Galaxy Evolution Melody offers a step by step introduction to the systems and imaginative devices at work in the practice of this art duo.

Lutz & Guggisberg

curator

Sophie Kaplan

production

La Criée centre for contemporary art, Rennes