Kilian Rüthemann Sooner Rather Than Later

In his solo exhibition Kilian Rüthemann (b. 1979 in Bütschwil, works and lives in Basle) is showing new works as well as an intervention involving works from the collection of the Glarner Kunstverein.

In his works, Kilian Rüthemann always engages with the given situation of an exhibition space. He investigates the architectural and spatial qualities and in a surprising manner and makes precise, generally minimal interventions into the existing structure. In this way he monopolises the space and subversively influences the public’s perception. Rüthemann belongs to a new generation of young artists who are again devoting themselves to formal and aesthetic explorations in sculpture, but who are at the same time interested in processes of transformation and dissolution rather than stasis and permanence. The works generally remain temporary alterations which are returned to their original state after the exhibition. The transformation of the working material effectively corresponds to a change in its aggregate conditions. Rüthemann is primarily interested in the ephemeral and the changeable, build-up and decay – both in his works and in the architecture of the exhibition sites. The title of the exhibition refers to a specific interim period within a process during which the artist locates his works.

In the skylight room, Rüthemann dismantles parts of the glass ceiling construction and displaces them into a spatial installation. The glass elements cross the room diagonally and are supported by an elaborate scaffolding construction. With this transformation the architecture itself becomes the object of the exhibition, the one with which the artist works. The conversion recalls fairground roller-coasters. The play with gravity is part of the fascination to which Rüthemann repeatedly returns in his works. In the installation with the ceiling glass, the danger of falling plays a significant part. The fragile pieces of original glass must be brought very carefully to their new position. A fall would destroy them immediately. The intervention is both minimal and spectacular and sets a strong example. But it also reveals fresh views of the roof construction, which is normally concealed from the public, and thus allows a glance behind the backdrop of the museum architecture.

Kilian Rüthemann is a trained sculptor, but he works only rarely with classical tools and materials. In this work, however, the artist’s craft is of central interest. In the side-light room he has built a table-platform for a marble sculpture. The podium forms the oversized plinth for the object that Rüthemann has chiselled from Carrara marble. The work shows the fleeting moment of the upward surge of a column of steam rising into the sky. The stone material almost seems to contradict the actually ephemeral situation, and the drama of the baroque representation of a cloud is also immediately broken by a miniaturisation of the object. A long art-historical tradition of cloud representations reverberates in this work. Even today, the dramatic and romantic aspect of cloud motifs in painting has currency in the atmospheric, the indistinct, and in the dematerialisation of the virtual space. Today the image of the rising cloud is ambivalent more than ever before. It recalls air pollution, atomic threat and natural disasters, and retains its aesthetic fascination. Another art-historical reference lies in debates surrounding the theory of sculpture since the 1960s and 70s. At that time, on the one hand, the Minimalists engaged with the character of art as object, while at the same time performance art and Process Art aimed at the involvement of the public and thus advanced the dematerialisation of the work in favour of a social function. In Rüthemann’s work both aspects have a part to play. The public is challenged to get up onto the plinth and physically approach the sculpture. Rüthemann deliberately leaves the viewer in a mist, providing no conclusive interpretation, merely a large number of questions which he challenges viewers to reflect upon.
In the Schneeli room Kilian Rüthemann is showing a spatial work with broken neon tubes, spread out in a serial pattern across the whole of the floor area. Here too he is quoting various positions from art history – Dan Flavin’s neon works, the spatial installation The 2000 Sculpture (1992) by Walter de Maria in Kunsthaus Zürich – and refers to the related discussions. As in those works to a certain extent, Rüthemann is concerned with industrially produced material made for everyday use, and the precise rhythm of structures laid out in a specific space. Another aspect of the work lies in its emphasis on fragility and the destruction of material, as well as in the potential threat to the viewer from the shards of glass on the floor. Not only could one cut oneself on these shards, there is also an invisible threat. In the destruction of the finished fluorescent tubes, mercury gas could have escaped and endangered the health of the viewers. But the artist removed the tubes from the production process early and transformed them for his purposes, so that this danger does not exist.

In the basement Rüthemann turns his attention to selected works from the collection of the Glarner Kunstverein. He uses dramatic ‹weather paintings› by Johann Gottfried Steffan, Balz Stäger, Johann Adolf Stäbli, Leberecht Lortet, Traugott Schiess, Albert Gos and Rudolf Tschudi, who engaged with cloud and water phenomena in mountain landscapes at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, as material for an installation. With these paintings, Rüthemann installs something like a virtual ‹mountain valley›. Here too various aggregate states, water, clouds and fog become the starting-points for reflections on ephemerality and the transformation of states. He also calls into question conventional forms of presentation by transposing the paintings to an installation. He thus challenges curatorial questions and opens up wide-ranging discussions about museum conventions. With his work, which works with material on-site, Rüthemann often makes very great demands on the exhibition business. By doing so he is making an institutionally critical statement.

As one passes through the exhibition, various motifs, materials and building elements are repeated in various constellations: scaffolding and glass, cut and plane, organic cloud and geometrical figure. An endless cycle of interpretation is produced. The elements within the exhibition repeatedly refer to themselves. Nonetheless, the exhibition does not remain a closed system, but suggests themes and motifs from the history of art and culture. The works emphasise an aspect critical of civilisation and display an artistic attitude mistrustful of the lasting, the static and the rational. He is not only interested in construction, but also in deconstruction, the remnants and disintegration processes that occur within nature and civilisation.