Pedro Wirz
The Horse Who Drank Beer

April 24th – June 12th 2016
Opening Reception : Sunday, April 24th (6 - 8 pm)

Pedro Wirz — artist page · Exhibition archive · Press archive

Gallery view with textured wall works, a suspended strip-like sculpture, and three glowing amber boxes on the dark floor.
Six textured wall works arranged in two columns, including irregular brown forms and pieces on pink, black, and tan panels.
Pale, roughly oval wall relief with a craggy surface, wavy ridges, and an uneven lower edge.
Broad, dark gray relief with ragged edges and a horizontal split, mounted on a pale rectangular panel.
Tall, irregular brown wall sculpture with curled, ragged sections, branching edges, and openings through its center.
Branching green-brown relief on a pink panel, with pale round forms clustered in an upper opening, inside a clear case.
Close-up of pale round forms with black centers nestled in a dark opening in the rough green-brown relief.
Long, narrow yellow-green relief with parallel ridges and uneven edges, mounted horizontally on a tan panel.
Rough brown rectangular relief with two pale circles and several holes, set against black in a clear display case.
Suspended textured strips above three glowing amber boxes, with a spotlighted wall sculpture visible through the doorway.
Side view of a suspended yellow-brown strip curling downward into a dark hooked end above an amber box.
Close-up of a curved brown surface with deep lengthwise grooves and small greenish strands crossing it.
View from above of one tall amber-lit box and two smaller cubes, with open tops, textured sides, and hanging light cords.
Inside an amber-toned box, two bare bulbs hang above a glossy base, surrounded by rough surfaces and small colored forms.
Two glowing bulbs hang inside a textured amber box above a dark green glossy base dotted with small raised forms.
Looking down into a box lined with textured brown panels and rows of small insect-like forms, with a bulb at the bottom.
Amber-lit panel filled with dark insect-like silhouettes, curled shapes, and one long winding form along the right side.
White pedestals with yellow and green clustered forms beside a doorway framing a dark sculpture on a mustard-colored wall.
Small rectangular wall work with a pale lavender-gray surface stretched across a yellow background.
Close-up of the wall work’s streaked lavender-gray surface, with irregular openings revealing a mustard-yellow background.
Yellow and green clustered sculptures on two mirror-topped pedestals, with a lavender-gray and yellow wall work behind them.
Four rounded, flower-like forms in yellow and green on two mirror-topped pedestals, reflected beneath them.
Spotlit dark wall sculpture beside a white pedestal bearing a pale round form with a long bristly projection.
Front view of a dark, elongated wall sculpture with two hand-like projections linked by red string, casting a strong shadow.
Side view of a dark wall sculpture with a curved upper end, projecting hand-like forms, red string, and two dangling lower ends.
Close-up of dark sculpted fingers with bright red string stretched between them in crossing lines.
Pale round, creased form with a long bundle of thin brown bristles projecting outward from a white pedestal.
Pale hanging sculpture with long uneven strips and a looped hanger, spotlighted beside a doorway on a mustard-colored wall.
Close view of a pale hanging tube with irregular openings and long curling strips, suspended from a large looped hanger.
Close-up of an amber-lit box corner with wrinkled translucent surfaces and dark insect-like forms.

Nascente Seca ("Spring Drought") 2016
Mix media
58 x 58 x 92 cm (23 " x 23 " x 36")

 

 

Pedro Wirz presents “The Horse Who Drank Beer” in his US debut at Kai Matsumiya. For the past year, Wirz has focused on decoding oral traditions, mythologies, and legends native to Pindamonhangaba, Brazil, an area in the Paraiba Valley intimately familiar to the peripatetic Swiss-Brazilian artist. In doing so, the artist investigates how myths and legends as recounted by individuals and societies often grow to become determining, self-fulfilling prophecies. 

The region's layered, primordial, modern and contemporary landscape has been the site of massive demographic shifts, with ongoing economic, political, and cultural implications as royalty, slaves, indigenous people, merchantmen, and industrialists collide. In his observations of these movements and shifts, Wirz emphasizes collaborations among and between social worlds, by people with a reverence for laughter, and a desire to intuitively explore and materialize the myths and legends of dying cultures and places.

The fruitful abundance of fantastic characters and magical phenomena from the Paraiba, Wirz says, are created from and passed on by a ubiquitous collective consciousness informed by both these rich and varied histories, and its transformative, fluctuating conditions. Wirz's sculptures and wall works ask the viewer to consider this complex interplay among the real, unreal, magical, and enchanted— realms that, while downplayed in contemporary culture, continue to operate in ever-evolving symbolic manifestations. 

In the sculptures, materials found in nature are manipulated with artificial substances. Surfaces of tree barks, for example, are texturized with coats of latex and acrylic paint generating a moment when the abstract provides a path, and where one thing becomes another. The bark from a tree becomes an alligator or the remnants of taxidermy; limes resemble objects on fire. Imagined insects, arachnids, reptiles, crustaceans, etc. line the insides of light-boxes made from silicon coated with thick latex, and placed upon a bed of epoxy resin which results in an amber-like texture. Though the effect of these materials and processes may seem archaic, to read these sculptures as anti-technological would be a mistake. Technology, in Wirz's work and judgment, informs our perception; it becomes part of the mythos of our dreams and imaginations. 

Pedro Wirz lives and works in Sao Paolo, Brazil and Basel, Switzerland. He is currently completing his artist’s residency at the Swiss Institute in Rome, Italy. He received a Bachelor degree of Fine Arts at FHNW HGK Institute of Arts in Basel (Switzerland). He also studied one year at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart (Germany)-Institute of Arts under the advisors Rainer Ganahl, Birgit Brenner, and Christian Jankowski. His work has been presented at the Tinguely Museum, Switzerland (2016), CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, USA (2015), Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany (2013), Dortmunder Kunstverein, Germany (2013), Palais de Tokyo, France (2013), Galerie Mendes Wood DM, Brazil (2013), Centro Cultural São Paulo, Brazil (2013), Post Studio Tales (Germany) (2012) and Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2011). He was also a resident at Cité international des Arts, Paris (2012) and Resident at Residency Unlimited – 2014 in New York.

The artist would like to kindly thank the support of the following people for making the exhibition possible: 

Natacha de Oliveria, Gabriel Lima, Kai Matsumiya, Rainer Ganahl, Sara Roffino, Viola Yeşiltaç, Orazio Battaglia, Stephan Berger, Michele Luminati, Marta Riniker-Radich, Arnaud Besson, Stefan Burger, Kilian Rüthemann, Judith Kakon, Christof Nuessli, Youri Kravtchenko, Cyrill Miksch, Vittorio Visciano, Adrienne Drake, Adam Szymczyk, Natalie Bell, Michele D'Aurizio, Hadi Fallahpisheh, Gina Folly, Maria Victoria, Maron Abujamra Wirz, Ricardo Roberto Wirz, Lucas Wirz and Paulo Wirz.