An exhibition of work by the Swiss artists Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger will be staged at the Museum Tinguely in Basel next summer during Art Basel 2018. Although the duo work in a wide range of media, they are best known for their large-scale interactive installations that reference nature and expose the hidden qualities of objects.
For the 2014 Sydney Biennial, Steiner & Lenzlinger created a gym where visitors could play music, make a skeleton dance or blow bubbles simply by using the modified gym equipment. “It’s the unexpected richness and beauty of things in different scales that is often at the core of multifaceted installations they do,” says Roland Wetzel, the Tinguely’s director. He describes the show as a “huge playground”, offering many possibilities for visitors to interact with the artists’ work.
At Art Basel, the Steiner & Lenzlinger’s work can be found at Basel-based Stampa gallery’s stand.
Tinguely’s danse macabre The Museum Tinguely has carved out space on the second floor so that Jean Tinguely’s haunting installation Mengele-Totentanz (Mengele dance of Death, (1986) finally has its own room. The piece is an assemblage of 18 machines made from debris the artist salvaged from a fire at a farm near his studio. It includes cow bells, burnt wood, animal skulls and old farm equipment that make noise and cast shadows on the walls as they move. The piece combines imagery related to a Dance of Death in the Middle Ages with the “machinery of death” under the Nazi regime. The burnt farm equipment was manufactured by the father of the notorious Nazi concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele.