LONDON.- Internationally renowned for sculptural installations and video works, Swiss artist Roman Signer presents Slow Movement, a new installation for the Curve using the kayak – a longstanding symbol and form in his work for three decades. Specially made for this show, a kayak moves through the 90-metre long gallery towed by a rope suspended from the ceiling, navigating the Curve as if moving through a canal. The exhibition extends out to the foyer and lakeside, with two other kayaks installed across the centre in unexpected ways, reflecting Signer’s playful and surreal approach to his subject. Slow Movement also includes a selection of earlier films featuring the kayak to explore the multiple facets of his innovative practice through his ongoing interest in this object. Roman Signer: Slow Movement is on view from 4 March to 31 May 2015.
Jane Alison, Head of Visual Arts, said: “Roman Signer’s trademark is the way in which he takes everyday objects and situations and renders them absurd. While he has remained a potent and influential figure in contemporary art over the last thirty years, his works have rarely been presented to British audiences. We are therefore delighted that he has agreed to share with us his homage to the kayak, in this, his first solo presentation in a public institution in London for more than a decade.”
Kayaks entered the artistic vocabulary of Roman Signer in the early 1980s. Greatly interested in outdoor activities, the artist himself was for many years an avid kayaker. When, for personal reasons, he had to stop kayaking, he started to use the simple form of the boat in his work. Signer makes connections between life and art and his work often shows influences of his own experiences and surroundings, particularly the landscape in the region of his native Appenzell in Switzerland.
Roman Signer said: “When I first saw the Curve I thought it looked like a tunnel so I had the vision of this kayak that is pulled through this special space, turning on itself at the end and taking the same path back.”
Signer’s materials in general tend to be immediate utilitarian objects, yet the manner in which he uses them is anything but banal. Action Kurhaus Weissbad (1992) saw chairs catapulted out of a hotel’s windows; Table (1994) launched a table into the sea on four buckets; Kayak (2000) featured the artist being towed down a road in a kayak. In Action in front of the Orangerie, made for documenta 8 (1987), 350 stacks of paper were lined up in a field then exploded into the air to form a fleeting wall of paper some 15 metres high. In Action with a Fuse (1989), he burned a fuse along the railway line from the town of his birth to that of his current home. The journey, from Appenzell to St. Gallen, took 35 eventful days. Time, in all of Signer’s works, has a transformative quality, expending itself with striking speed or with exaggerated slowness.
Born in Appenzell, Switzerland in 1938, Roman Signer initially studied at the Schule für Gestaltung in Zurich and worked as an architectural draftsman before undertaking training in sculpture at Schule für Gestaltung, Lucerne, Switzerland (1969–71) and the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, Poland (1971–72). He rose to prominence in the 1990s and represented Switzerland at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999. Notable solo exhibitions include Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2014), Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau (2012), Swiss Institute, New York (2010), Sprengel Museum Hanover (2010), Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2007), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2007), Camden Art Centre, London (2000), and Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (2000).
