Gruppenausstellung
Virtual Exhibition Tour

Hauser & Wirth
Durslade Farm, Dropping Ln, Bruton, BA10 0NL

'Gruppenausstellung’ is a celebration of Hauser & Wirth’s Swiss heritage through a playful presentation of over 20 artists, including Phyllida Barlow, Martin Creed, Nicole Eisenman, Isa Genzken, Rodney Graham, Richard Hamilton, Mary Heilmann, Camille Henrot, Jenny Holzer, Richard Jackson, Rashid Johnson, Allison Katz, Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades, Pipilotti Rist, Dieter Roth, Björn Roth, Mika Rottenberg, Anri Sala, Cindy Sherman, Roman Signer, Lorna Simpson, Alina Szapocznikow, Franz West and David Zink Yi. The multidisciplinary exhibition is inspired by the notion of a traditional Kunsthalle, conceived as a place to showcase groundbreaking art and explore contemporary issues with a broad audience. The entire site takeover provides a platform for discovery and interaction, extending to all five galleries, outdoor sculpture and a collaborative events programme with the Roth Bar & Grill. The exhibition will evolve in three parts over the course of seven months, featuring immersive installations, solo presentations and iconic video works. Alongside the exhibition, the Education Lab takes its starting point from Mika Rottenberg’s commitment to environmentally sustainable creative practices, developed by the gallery’s green teams globally.

Artists are central to the experimental ethos of Hauser & Wirth Somerset, fostering new points of connection and inclusive approaches to experiencing art. Many of the artists featured in the exhibition, such as Martin Creed, Rashid Johnson, Allison Katz and Pipilotti Rist, have lived and worked in Bruton as part of the gallery’s longstanding residency programme, drawing inspiration from Durslade Farm, the local community and surrounding Somerset landscape. Hauser & Wirth's current artist-in-residence, Allison Katz, has created a series of new exhibition posters that are displayed across the site. For Katz, designing posters is a way of playfully exploring protocols of typography, language and graphics, whilst addressing themes of consumption, desire and memory.

Threshing Barn
Martin Creed’s ‘Work No. 243 HELLO’ (2000) greets visitors as they enter the Threshing Barn. A true polymath, Creed’s work blurs the distinction between art and life, bringing the world into his work with fascinating transparency and humour. Stand out sculptures and video installations by Phyllida Barlow and Pipilotti Rist are centrepieces within the multisensory spectacle that will fill the space from floor to ceiling. A pioneer of spatial video art, Rist’s ‘香港中環吊燈 (Central Hong Kong Chandelier)’ (2021) draws on the inner and outer worlds of kaleidoscopic wonderment. Rist encourages her viewers to recline, inviting them to contemplate, and at the same time, share a collective experience with their fellow spectators. In a similar vein, Barlow’s fabric pompoms, ‘Untitled: GIG’ (2014), urge visitors to look up and observe the relationship between objects and the space that surrounds them, conceived for Hauser & Wirth Somerset’s inaugural exhibition in 2014. Richard Jackson’s neon signs flash with evocative puns and statements that engage with the artist’s interest in hunting culture and its vernacular, seen in works such as ‘HOTSHOT’ (2022), ‘BIG FAT PIG’ (2010) and ‘BARE BEAR’ (2008). Jackson’s work offers an ironic comment on the heroic pretensions associated with the medium, with works such as ‘Art Fair Party’ (2014), a direct and humorous critique of the structure of the commercial art world. Jason Rhoades’ neon installations, such as ‘Shelf (Mutton Chops) with Unpainted Donkey’ (2003), continue to signpost social commentary whilst pushing against the safety of cultural conventions. The unbridled, brazenly maximalist works attract, repulse and mystify the viewer, igniting questions that only multiply with prolonged exposure.

Workshop and Pigsty Galleries
The Workshop and Pigsty Galleries have been transformed to showcase Mika Rottenberg’s seminal video installation, ‘Cosmic Generator (Loaded #2)’ (2017 – 2018). This surreal and subversive video work explores globalisation, labour and spectacle, and is perhaps the best introduction to Rottenberg’s oeuvre. Filmed on-site at a market for plastic goods in Yiwu, China and in Mexicali, Mexico, a town near the US border, which is home to a large Chinese population, the video installation forms connections among seemingly disparate geographies. The video mixes scenes of real locations with elements of magical realism shot in a studio. Slow pans over vendors sitting in their booths full of cheap, glittering, rainbow wares are juxtaposed with Chinese restaurants in the Mexican border city, where miniature besuited corporate clones wriggle on beds of cilantro/coriander. A tunnel connects the two locations on opposite sides of the world—an analogue version of the digital networks that move capital around the world at the touch of a button. The distinction between fantasy architecture and real space is further blurred by a fabricated tunnel surrounding the video installation, through which viewers enter the space, and a curtain of coloured tinsel through which they exit. By weaving fact and fiction together, Rottenberg highlights the inherent beauty and absurdity of our contemporary existence.

Rhoades Gallery
Kino / Cinema The ‘Kino / Cinema’ presents a changing weekly schedule of important video and film works over the course of the exhibition, featuring Martin Creed, Nicole Eisenman, Rodney Graham, Camille Henrot, Richard Jackson, Rashid Johnson, Paul McCarthy, Mika Rottenberg, Pipilotti Rist, Anri Sala and Lorna Simpson. Pipilotti Rist’s video works ‘I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much’ (1986) and ‘(Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler’ <(Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes> (1988) launch the programme in June. Both early works appropriate and subvert the language of music videos, with the latter juxtaposing images of Rist collapsing to the ground with bursts of wildly scrambled electronic distortion. At the time, Rist was seen to be making a feminist and ironic comment on the representations of women in 1980s popular culture. Further video works on view include Paul McCarthy’s ‘cisuM fo dnuoS ehT/The Sound of Music’ (2008), an upside down and reverse projection of the iconic Hollywood musical ‘The Sound of Music’ (1965), Lorna Simpson’s ‘Call Waiting’ (1997), a web of open-ended stories and conversations between various speakers, Rashid Johnson’s ‘The New Black Yoga’ (2011), a visual poem about improvisation and the evolution of persona, and Camille Henrot’s ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013), an ambitious video that attempts to tell the story of the universe’s creation for which she received the Silver Lion at 55th Venice Biennale.

Bourgeois Gallery
The Bourgeois Gallery opens with a solo presentation of Paul McCarthy’s ‘White Snow Dwarves’ (2010 – 2012), on loan from the Ursula Hauser Collection, between June and August. These fantastical works, alongside drawings from the same theme, are the result of McCarthy’s exploration of the famous 19th Century German folk tale ‘Snow White (Schneewittchen)’ which was famously published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, and subsequently Disney’s film interpretation ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ (1937). McCarthy is known for his aggressive, high-energy performances, films, drawings, and sculptures. The artist uses disturbing, provocative and often sexually explicit images to expose the hypocrisy, power structures, and relationships in Western culture. McCarthy uses his own body as a tool in his performances, employing paint, ketchup, raw meat, and mayonnaise to confront the viewer with a visceral, even shocking, experience. From September until October, the Bourgeois Gallery will host a collection of works by artist Franz West. West’s unconventional forms, produced from the 1970s until his death in 2012, often require an interaction between the viewer and the artwork. West believed that art should be a collaborative creation between the artist and the viewer, bringing art into a realm that is less contemplative and more active and engaging.

Cloister and Yard
New outdoor sculpture presentation In addition to the wealth of indoor works, a new outdoor sculpture presentation includes works by Camille Henrot, Jenny Holzer, Rashid Johnson, Mika Rottenberg, Franz West and David Zink Yi. Each of these works challenge the boundaries between the viewer and the object, taking the opportunity to explore our relationship to art in a more immediate and physical way. These works play with themes of authority, ancestry, and artificiality, subverting our expectations of what art can be. A new outdoor work by Mika Rottenberg will be unveiled later in the exhibition. Visitors are invited to interact with these works, to touch, climb and engage with them in a direct and physical way, creating an immediate dialogue between the artwork and the viewer. Rottenberg’s new work is intended to challenge our conceptions of the gallery space, to provoke questions about the nature of art and the role of the viewer, and to encourage us to think critically about the world around us. The outdoor sculpture presentation will remain on view through to January.

Education Lab
Hauser & Wirth’s Education Lab provides a platform for the gallery’s global green teams to collaborate and share their commitment to environmentally sustainable creative practices. The Lab is inspired by artist Mika Rottenberg, whose practice often explores the relationship between the body, labour and globalisation, with a particular focus on the environment. The Lab is an interactive space where visitors can learn more about environmental sustainability through creative, hands-on experiences. Throughout the exhibition, visitors are invited to participate in the activation of the space, engage with environmental sustainability themes, and contribute their own ideas and actions to a growing ‘ideas bank’. The Lab will provide regular public programmes, including talks, workshops and film screenings, and a wide range of resources, including reading lists and action plans, will be available for visitors to take away and implement in their own lives.

Virtual Exhibition Tour constructed by Jeffrey Porterfield of Hauser & Wirth's Digitech deparment. 360º Views by V21 Artspace.

Find out more: hauserwirth.com
From 3rd June 2023 to 1st January 2024

More Virtual Exhibitions→