Within the contemporary art world Mai-Thu Perret occupies a remarkably independent position. Her work is characterised by both thematic and formal radicalism combined with a kind of self-evidence and lightness that is immediately captivating. The young Geneva-based artist juggles in a virtuoso manner with the most diverse artistic work techniques, feeling as much at home in traditional craft media such as ceramics or textile art as in performative practices and complex electronic video and audio technologies. Her work is fuelled by an extraordinary theoretical and intellectual depth that is, in turn, balanced out by the aesthetic and material sensuality of the works themselves.
Some of Perret’s works seem related to the kind of shifts in perception induced by drugs. In Little Planetary Harmony (2006) the artist unceremoniously inverts scale; as a result, viewers facing the giant teapot find themselves in a dreamlike situation reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. The accessible silver teapot stands in space like a UFO of sorts – an apparition defying easy spatial definition and thematic interpretation. In the round and white interior of the pot we lose any sense of orientation. The only points of reference are six panel paintings that add up to a small presentation, an exhibition within the exhibition, a museum within the museum. Yet there is no repetition of the external shape as in a Matryoshka doll; instead, maximum contrast is created. The functional museum architecture of the surrounding gallery is undercut by the extravagant, playful miniature museum architecture – spaceship architecture of the kind we encounter in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Thus Little Planetary Harmony may be read as critical commentary on the commercialised architecture of entertainment that relies on eye-catching exteriors. This is a topic area that Mai-Thu Perret became involved with through an in-depth reading of an important text: Venturi, Brown and Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972). This book’s fundamental analysis of the relationship between appearance and content in contemporary architecture is not only germane to urbanism, but may also be relevantly reflected upon with regard to the visual arts. And so this work of the artist, too, is the result of profound theoretical and intellectual text analysis, with the cerebral gravity skilfully being balanced out by the work’s sensual poetry.
With the acquisition of Little Planetary Harmony (2006) a key work of Perret has found its way into the collection. It is a multi-layered work of an artist who has recently been drawing considerable national and international attention with her multidisciplinary oeuvre, not least due to her major solo show 2011 at the Aargauer Kunsthaus.
