ZILVINAS
KEMPINAS TUBE VENICE BIENNALE
Spencer Brownstone Gallery is delighted to announce the opening of Zilvinas
Kempinas' major new installation 'Tube' at the 53rd Venice Biennale, which
opened June 7th and continues through November 22nd.
Zilvinas was chosen to represent Lithuania by an independent committee from the
Lithuanian Ministry of Culture and presents his installation at the Scuola
Grande della Misericordia, a majestic building designed by architect Jacopo
Sansovino that dates to the 16th century and has never before been used as a
pavilion for the Venice Biennale.
'Tube', a work that the artist first realized during a six-month stay at
Atelier Calder in 2008, creates a dramatic enclosed walkway over 80 feet long
from stretched lengths of videotape. The work is one of the latest in a series
employing Kempinas' signature medium of unspooled magnetic tape, works that
have inventively exploited the strength and ultra-lightweight nature of tape to
create beguiling and seemingly contradictory physical spectacles that
skillfully subvert relationships with architecture, form, and space.
ZILVINAS KEMPINAS
Zilvinas Kempinas was born in Plunge, Lithuania in 1969 and lives and
works in New York. His first solo exhibition at Spencer Brownstone Gallery was
'Flying Tape', in 2004, and he has since then had two further solo exhibitions
at the gallery, most recently 'White Noise' in 2007. The artist has also
featured in solo presentations at Kunsthalle, Vienna; PS1, New York; Palais de
Tokyo, Paris; and the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania. His work has
been recently featured in group exhibitions at Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin;
Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto, Ontario; San Francisco MoMA; Lund
Konsthall; and Manifesta 7. He is a recipient of both the Calder Prize and the
Atelier Calder studio residency and was chosen as one of Art Review Magazine's
'Future Greats.'
