Lang/Baumann
Beautiful Steps # 6, 2011. Installation. 580 x 180 x 500 cm
The work by L/B is interactive an dynamic. It is ornamental but surpasses the decorative frontiers, maintaining a style and taste that remembers successful designs from the 60s and 70s with a strong influence from Pop Art.
Most of the projects they convey are site specific, developed within the aesthetic and thematic context. Through their installations, they take spatiality as a major concern, as well as the use people give to the space in order to achieve harmonious projects that ensure wellbeing.
Most of the titles they use are a reference to wellbeing, such as COMFORT, BEAUTIFUL or PERFECT, connecting the art piece with a more commercial product that readapts to the different spaces according its necessities.
The vocabulary used by the artists is free enough to accomplish projects of any kind and for any space, within its characteristic abstraction. L/B’s creative process is seductive, since they have already established the unity between the bi-dimensional and the three-dimensional works with no conflict whatsoever. It doesn’t matter if it’s a mural or a staircase, an object of a flammable element; it’s all part of a body they skillfully know how to play with, with great humor.
For Of Bridges & Borders, L/B developed two separate projects that connect, yet can be read independently.
A, they produces a new piece, part of the Beautiful Steps series they started in 2009. They are white stairs that float in space and go nowhere. In this case, they can be translated as an impossible frontier. Stairs are normally used as an architectonical tool, yet here they are transformed into a sculpture-like piece that is there only as a representation of what they are.
The piece is obviously a reference to thinkers and artists of the past century, such as M.C Escher with its famous infinite staircase from his engraving Ascending and Descending (1960), or the impossible staircase by Penrose, made the year before, remembering the engraving from the Piranese jails, engraved by the Italian artists two centuries beforehand, or the stairs from Borges literary works.
-
L/B (Sabina Lang: 1972, Berna / Daniel Baumann: 1967, San Francisco). Live and work in Bergdorf, Switzerland since 1990. L/B is an Swiss artists duo presented for the first time in Latin-America. They are known for their installations and site specific projects that mix art with design and architecture. They work with Galleries such as Loevenbruck in Paris, Urs Meile in Lucerna and Beijing. They held exhibitions in museums such as Palais de Tokyo, Paris, la Nuit Blanche in Madrid and Paris and Musac de Leon. Participated in Art Setouchi 2010, Megijima, Kagawa, Japan; Utopics 11, Swiss Art Exhibtion, Biel-Bienne, Switzerland. Among their awards, the most important would be the Swiss Art Award in 1998 and 2002.