Zilvinas Kempinas: Slow Motion at Museum Tinguely, Basel

Zilvinas Kempinas: Slow Motion at Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland is the largest exhibition of the New York-based Lithuanian artist to date. Zilvinas Kempinas is known for his kinetic works with magnetic tape. In this video, the curator of the exhibition and director of Museum Tinguely, Roland Wetzel, provides us with an introduction to the show.

Zilvinas Kempinas: Slow Motion is spread across four exhibition floors and features both newly designed works and works that have already been on show elsewhere but are constantly re-created in each specific new space. Among the earlier works on display are Moon Sketch (2005), Parallels (2007), Ballroom (2010), and the 2-Fan Drawings. One of the most recent works is Light Pillars (2013), composed of two large, eight meter-tall, freestanding cylinders that are formed by several concentric layers of videotape. This piece and several other works are presented in dialogue with Jean Tinguely’s works. The exhibition is curated by Roland Wetzel, director of Museum Tinguely and has been set up in an intensive collaboration with Zilvinas Kempinas.

Zilvinas Kempinas: Slow Motion at Museum Tinguely, Basel. Exhibition walkthrough and introduction by Roland Wetzel (Director, Museum Tinguely), June 5, 2013.

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Zilvinas Kempinas was born in Lithuania in 1969. In 1987 Zilvinas began studies in painting at the State Art Institute, completing them in 1993 at the same institute, which by then was renamed the Art Academy. In 1994 Zilvinas Kempinas was given the opportunity to set up his first solo exhibition, “Painting from Nature”, at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius. At the end of 1997 he left for New York, where he studied ‘combined media’ from 1998 to 2002 at Hunter College. He had his first solo exhibition in the USA in 2003 at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, followed by further exhibitions, among them a solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Vienna in 2008. In the same year, Kempinas won the Calder Prize and spent six months in Calder’s atelier in Saché, France, where he prepared his contribution for the installation Tube – a work with which he represented Lithuania at the Venice Art Biennale in 2009.

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