Pipilotti Rist designs NZZ art issue

Moving, colorful shapes adorn the cover page and selected pages of the NZZ-Saturday edition. They were created by Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist and are closely linked to the layout and type area of the newspaper: For example, the color of the illustrations in the newspaper changes where the frame passes through them.

With the design of the NZZ Pipilotti Rist at the same time expresses the theme of re- and upcycling, in that the NZZ can be used in a completely different way. The pages designed by Rist should be able to lead a second life as placemats after reading.

In an interview with Feuilleton editor Birgit Schmid, the artist explains how the idea came about: "I love placemats and am a reuse fetishist at the same time. In addition, newspapers are very hygienic. Our father Walter, as a family doctor, also helped with spontaneous deliveries and, for lack of clean cloths, used a fresh newspaper in an emergency to lay down a newborn before cutting the umbilical cord."

Pipilotti Rist is a pioneer of video art. She has been working with the medium since the mid-eighties, and her innovative approach to it is considered to be style-forming. With her incessantly streaming images, with sounds, music and song, she creates a unique cosmos and breaks with conventional visual habits and common notions of space. Her artistic work developed in harmony with technical progress, whose new possibilities she explores in a playful way.

The feature section of the NZZ-On Saturday, the first issue of the "Kunstausgabe" focuses entirely on the work of Pipilotti Rist. In addition to the double-page interview, readers can look forward to a retrospective of her work by feature editor Philipp Meier. Phillip Meier and Birgit Schmid have followed the artist's creative process over the years. They say about the collaboration: "The exchange was inspired and inspiring, Pipilotti Rist showed a lot of enthusiasm for this carte blanche. She answered promptly and with great openness to the bouquet of questions that came with the design of the paper. In this way, we also got to know the person behind the artist a little better - a woman full of drive, willfulness and passion who playfully appropriates the world."

Parallel to the art issue, Pipilotti Rist produced for the NZZ the exclusive edition "The sun sets in the west and rises again in the east". In it, she illustrates the hopeful, colorful approach of her work - in which the sun must set so that it can rise again - but also her multimedia frame of reference: The painterly-looking print is digitally generated, its aspect ratio is in 4:3 video format, paying homage to the analog PAL era. The edition is limited to 100 copies, hand-signed and costs 3500 francs.