Bill Bollinger

About

The Fruitmarket Gallery is proud to present this major exhibition of the work of American artist Bill Bollinger (1939—1988), one of the most important artists of the 1960s. A work of art historical rediscovery as well as an exhibition of great power and beauty, it brings an artist once mentioned in the same breath as Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, Eva Hesse and Fred Sandback back for serious reconsideration. Bollinger's work is characterised by his sensitive use of the idiosyncrasies and possibilities offered by technical and industrial materials. Works made with aluminium pipes, rope, rubber hoses, chain-link fencing, lightbulbs and wheelbarrows are as radical and direct as they are elegant, exploiting physical laws such as gravity, balance, and the intrinsic properties of water. His sculpture, created in the 1960s at the height of the space race, has an astonishing energy and power, even today. The exhibition provides the first ever overview of Bollinger's brief but extremely intense artistic career, and provides an opportunity to rediscover the radical practice of this exceptional artist who, in his own words, was ‘not interested in the aesthetics of form but the fact of form'; who considered his work ‘not as primarily expressive through form but declarative through state'. Exhibition organised by the Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein in collaboration with The Fruitmarket Gallery.