Pipilotti Rist

She lives with her common law partner Balz Roth, with whom she has a son named Himalaya.

She was born as Elisabeth Charlotte Rist, on June 21, 1962 in Grabs, Sankt Gallen, in Switzerland. Later she got the nickname ‘Pipilotti’ after the novel ‘Pippi Longstocking’ by Astrid Lindgren.

From 1982 to 1986, she studied commercial art, illustration and photography at the ‘Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst’ in Vienna. She later studied video at the ‘School of Design’ (Schule für Gestaltung) in Basel, Switzerland.

From 1988 to 1994, she played drums and bass in an all-girl rock band, Les Reines Prochaines (“The Next Queens”).

In 1986, her first production titled ‘I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much’ was released. In the video, she starred as a hysterical brunette singing an altered line from a Beatles song.

In the 1990s, she exhibited at a number of major venues, including the ‘Museum of Contemporary Art’ in Chicago, the ‘Stedelijk Museum’ in Amsterdam, and the ‘National Gallery’ in Berlin.

In 1992, she released ‘Pickelporno (Pimple porno)’, a work about the female body and sexual excitation. The images are charged by intense colors, and are simultaneously strange, sensual, and ambiguous.

Her 1997 video titled ‘Ever is Over All’ shows in slow-motion a young woman walking along a city street, smashing the windows of parked cars with a large hammer in the shape of a tropical flower. The audio-video installation has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

From 2002 to 2003 she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as a visiting faculty member at the invitation of Professor Paul McCarthy.

In 1998, she was one of six finalists for the Hugo Boss Prize, an award administered every two years by the Guggenheim Foundation for significant achievement in contemporary art, and her single-channel video installation ‘Sip My Ocean’ (1996) was shown at the ‘Guggenheim Museum SoHo’ in New York City.

Her work has been the subject of solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; AroS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Århus, Denmark; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Tex.; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y Léon, Spain.