Galerie Urs Meile is pleased to announce the opening of the first solo exhibition in the gallery of Swiss artist Mirko Baselgia (*1982). The exhibition’s title Habitat goes back to the biological term describing a place where an organism or a community of organisms lives, including the specificities of the surrounding environment. The term originates from the Latin verb “àbitat”, meaning “it lives”, and in full it refers to all natural and artificial conditions characterizing a human settlement. Mirko Baselgia is interested in all facets of this notion, embracing the connections that vegetal species, as well as animals and humans have with each other and with the environment they live in. For the artist the idea of habitat has very much to do not only with the territory, but also with the soil, and the invisible life that is hidden in the underground world.
The pomegranates (Purscheida, 2018, vulcano stone from Vesuvs eruption of 1944, each (H) 11cm, Ø 11 cm) exhibited in the first room evoke precisely the underworld and its Greek goddess Persephone, the personification of vegetation, also associated with spring. The mythological tale tells that Persephone was gathering flowers when she was seized by Hades and removed to the underworld. Because of her mother’s Demeter misery, Zeus, her father, intervened, commanding Hades to release Persephone. Hades complied with the request, but first he tricked her, giving her some pomegranate seeds to eat. Since Persephone had tasted food in the underworld, she was obliged to spend a third of the year - the winter months - there, and the remaining time with the gods above. This is actually an origin story to explain the seasons cycle; when Persephone and her mother Demeter are reunited, the Earth flourishes with vegetation, but for some months each year, when the goddess returns to the underworld, the soil becomes once again a barren realm. The black fruits, exact magnified reproductions of a pomegranate found near the Vesuvius, are sculpted into volcanic stone from the last eruption in 1944 that has been collected by the artist in that same area. His choice was dictated by the underground origin of this stone, resulting from the differentiation process of magma erupted from the volcano. If the pomegranates symbolize the temptation, the ones exhibited here, still closed, give to Persephone the possibility to choose, the hope to change her destiny.
In the same room we see a series of four drawings (Autolyse - Coprinus Comatus, 2018, pencil, ink out of the Coprinus Comatus, handmade paper from Papiermühle Basel, each 77 x 55 cm). Each drawing represents a couple or a single Coprinus comatus, the shaggy mane, a common fungus also known as the “inky cap” because of the curious character of autodeliquescence of its gills. The gill tissue digests itself and begins to curl up, allowing easy release of the spores above. The self-digestion continues until the entire fruiting body, through a biological process called autolysis, has dissolved itself turning to black ink. Destruction has here an unexpected positive meaning, since it is the necessary condition for the growth of the next generation. Intrigued by this peculiar phenomenon, the artist decided to go in search of these fungi in the woods. Once he founded them, he first made a drawing, and subsequently picked them to produce the black ink following an old recipe. The exhibited works are analogical enlargements of the original drawings realized with the fungi’s ink. The mushrooms are represented in their natural environment to underline the strong connection that these organisms have with the surrounding soil and living species.
A nature print of a bird nest (Nia d’utschels - sylvia borin, 2018, lead (20% tin, 80% lead), 77 x 55 x 1.1 cm) that the artist found on the ground during a walk completes the arrangement of the first room. To obtain this print the nest was placed between a plate of steel and another of lead that were subsequently drawn through a pair of rollers under considerable pressure. A perfect impression of the nest in the leaden plates finally resulted from the separation of the two plates. Because of the high pressure, after this process the nest was destroyed. The resulting impression is therefore a unicum that makes us think about the ideas of presence, absence, mortality and the traces that every single living subject or object leaves in the environment. The nests are obviously also the symbols of home, the habitat that one shapes to comfortably and safely live in. And if birds can choose freely their home and don’t have to pay for it, the artist is intrigued by the fact that mankind has created a system where living has a more or less high price and is ruled by many restrictions.
On the walls of the gallery’s main room hang different arrangements of framed modules of stone pine wood. These modules, all of the same dimensions, composed the installation reproducing the American rail network based on the Rand, McNally & Co.’s New Railway Guide Map of 1873 that the artist realized last spring for the solo exhibition Pardis (Curzoin) at the Bellelay Abbey, and covered the church’s floor. Some fragments of this floor installation of 650 m2 were framed in American nutwood and hanged on the wall (American Railroads, 2018, swiss stone pine wood (pinus cembra), american nut wood (frame), between 90 x 90 and 180 x 360 cm). The resulting reliefs remind the railway tracks, but create at the same time new, more abstract realities. Their grid structure suggests the fragmentation and the creation of boundaries resulting from the human transformation of natural territories. Each module’s and arrangement’s title is actually composed by the letters and numbers evoking the place occupied in the big map conceived by the artist to build the installation at the Bellelay Abbey. The frames transform however each fragment into a new territory, and give birth to separate microcosms with a pictorial, more evocative quality. In relation to the original representation of the American railway the ideas of connection, but also of division, human possession, and of a restricted liberty of movement or even imprisonment come to mind.
Material and structural transformation processes are at the base of many works of the artist, who likes using a variety of materials, working in direct contact with them, and observing their physical and chemical transformation. Like an alchemist, through the visible alterations of the exterior world, its materials and structures, the artist also achieves an inner, personal transformation allowing him to get closer to his true self and the way he wants to live and interact with his environment.
The ideas of territory, natural resources, impermanence of things, and the cycle of life, death and rebirth are central to the present exhibition and recurrent in the artist’s practice. Baselgia considers the observation and the redefinition of the dynamics and structures that shape our world, indicating the essential interdependence connecting human beings and their activities with the rest of the natural world, as an occasion for personal growth. Through his works and experience, the viewers can also find some inspirations to progress in the exploration of their inner world and life in general.
Mirko Baselgia was born 1982 in Lantsch/Lenz, Switzerland. He graduated 2010 at the Zurich University of the Arts in Fine Arts. His solo shows include: Pardis (Curzoin), Abbatiale de Bellelay, Bellelay, Switzerland (2018); Transmutaziun, Kunst in der Krypta No5, Grossmünster Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland (2017); The pattern which connects, Kunstmuseum Olten, Olten, Switzerland (2014). Recent group exhibitions include: Beehave, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, Switzerland (2018); Formen der Natur: Pure Nature Art, Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden-Rot, Germany (2018); Extended Ground, Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne, Switzerland (2017); Nach der Natur - Material, Form, Struktur, Museum Sinclair-Haus - Altana Kulturstiftung, Bad Homburg, Germany (2017); Triennale 2017 - Art Contemporain Valais, Martigny, Switzerland (2017).

OPENING : Friday, November 23, 2018, 5.30–7.30pm, the artist will be present.

mpefm SWITZERLAND art press release