Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger: Too early to panic

Too early to panic. Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger
Since 1997, the year they began their collaboration, Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger have been co-creating in situ installations, often immersive ones, in the form of lush worlds where natural elements mix with just as many manufactured objects. Transformation, proliferation and crystallization function as fully fledged components of the work, which metamorphoses according to the chemical reactions that develop within it. This summer at Museum Tinguely, Basel, the artist duo invite the visitors to cross a fantastical universe made up of multi-coloured landscapes, and to participate in experiments that awaken their senses and mind. For this first exhibition encompassing their whole career and revisiting 30 years of practice, the artist duo have chosen to shape the exhibition space like a spatiotemporal labyrinth. As soon as visitors enter, they are invited to choose one of three doors, those of the past, present or future. Each door leads to a different chapter of the artists’ universe, which in turn leads to a multitude of potential journeys, divided into different stations. Visitors will be able to cross a forest of branches, take a turn on a seesaw, shed a tear for aesthetic-scientific purposes, converse with beauty professionals, exercise their physical faculties on fitness machines or lie down under a suspended meteorite.

The artists’ installations, which are as unsettling as they are enchanting, forge links between antagonistic worlds, proposing to observe the strange laboratory of the living with its biodiversity—now no less artificial than natural—and to ponder notions of fertility, growth, beauty and death. Using invasive plants, rampant fingernails, hairy plastic, collected tears and growing synthetic fertilizer crystals, Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger set up an exhibition between nature and artificiality full of cabinets of curiosities which can be discovered from June 6 to September 23, 2018 in Basel.

Gerda Steiner (Ettiswil LU, 1967) & Jörg Lenzlinger (Uster ZH, 1964)
Steiner & Lenzlinger live and work in Langenbruck, in the canton of Basel-Landschaft (CH). They participated in Expo02 with a gigantic Heimatmaschine generating plants and artificial crystals. During the 2003 Venice Biennale, where they represented Switzerland, they created a hanging installation, crystalline and light, floating in the space inside San Stae church. Their installations have also been shown at Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf (2014), at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (2004), in the ancient Stiftsbibliothek in St. Gallen (2005), at the Biennial of Contemporary Art in Seville (2004), at the Moscow Biennale (2009), and more recently at the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2017).

Curator: Séverine Fromaigeat