Tobias Putrih exhibition at Laumeier Sculpture Park

Tuesday, 26 September 2006 14:39

St. Louis, MO – This fall, Laumeier Sculpture Park is pleased to present the first solo museum exhibition in the United States by Tobias Putrih.  Opening October 7, 2006 and continuing through January 14, 2007, Tobias Putrih’s exhibition, quasi-random, will span the indoor galleries of Laumeier’s Museum Building.

Tobias Putrih was born in Kranj, Slovenia in 1972.  He currently lives and works in New York City and Ljubljana, Slovenia.  The artist graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Ljubljana in 1997 and studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, Germany from 1997-1998.  Putrih recently completed an installation at Mudam Luxembourg and has had recent group exhibitions at MoMa’s P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and New Langton Arts in San Francisco.  Influenced by both Buckminster Fuller and Robert Smithson, Putrih works in a variety of materials, many of them non-traditional, such as cardboard or egg cartons.  His sculpture and installation work often distorts space and manipulates the viewer’s perception.

Putrih’s work currently jumps between magical built objects and active environments where viewers can frequently interact with the work and physically make changes to the piece.  The exhibition will include the cut cardboard sculpture, Macula A_0, which solidifies and disintegrates as viewers change position.  Each piece of SpaceScriptSet, the room-sized, geodesic-dome-inspired aluminum work that will be shown is articulated and can move – the piece has endless possible variations.  The modular wood panels, Studio at Laumeier, which will occupy the three center galleries, are also completely interchangeable.  The rooms that visitors will see today may not be the rooms that they see tomorrow.