Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s 11500m2 Bodon Galleries have been filled with four massive mounds of turd sculpted by Vienna-based artists collective Gelatin. Gelatin’s humorous, infectiously enthusiastic works involve the public with special costumes – as participants. The Vienna-based artists operate on the borders of painting, sculpture and rock music; of architecture and sport, performance and fashion; between staged event and spontaneous discussion, constantly evading categorization.
The exhibition ‘Vorm – Fellows – Attitude’ in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, presents Gelatin’s longstanding and unbiased interest in the human condition, placing the body at the center of their process. The exhibition presents site-specific, monumental works, exalting the unique character of the museum’s galleries. A celebration of sculpture which embodies a unifying attribute of humanity, a social, cultural, economical regulator, while at the same time inquiring over the negative connotation excrement has gained over time.
“This is also a show for all who think that contemporary art is shit,” says Gelatin. “They should come and see this shit show. They will be satisfied.
Exhibition curator Francesco Stocchi compares Gelatin to a bar of soap: “As soon as you think you have a grip on them, they slip away from you, leaving their essence in your hands”. The new sculptures, especially conceived for the Bodon rooms of the Museum, stand in a long line of works and sculptural concepts Gelatin has been playing with for more then 2 decades.
Other projects have included Human Elevator, 1999: a lift employing human muscle power in Los Angeles, The B Thing staged in New York in 2000, when Gelatin installed a temporary balcony on the ninety-first floor of the World Trade Centre; Nellanutella, 2001 where they plunged into Venice’s canals for the Biennale; True Love IV, 2002, a wooden rocket in South Korea; Gelitin at the Shore of Lake Pipi Kacka, 2003: a human birthday cake in London; and Otto Volante, 2004, a self-made functioning rollercoaster in Galleria Massimo De Carlo in Milan.
Moreover Gelitin have created a gigantic human objectcopier (Tantamounter 24/7, 2005); an enormous-giraffe-long pink rabbit in the Italian mountains (Hase / Rabbit / Coniglio, 2005); a sculpture of frozen urine for the 1st Moscow Biennial (Zapf de Pipi, 2005); a lake with rowing boats on a terrace of the Hayward Gallery, London (Normally, Proceeding and Unrestricted with Without Title, 2008); a sculpture of a gigantic nose by the Danube near Sankt Lorenz in Austria (The Wachauer Nase, 2014) and a hundred illuminated balloons in a cave in Puerto Rico (Cave Show, 2014).
The exhibition will run until August 12, 2018.
images © Jason Schmidt and Gelatin