Environmental Hangover, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, CH

Before leaving behind a communications job in a toxic landfill to attend art school in Basel, Switzerland, Pedro Wirz spent most of his youth in the tropical region of the Paraíba Valley, Brazil. He often locates his inspirations in the region’s massively changing ecologies, demographics, mythologies, and superstitions. Raised by an agronomist who specialized in soil, and a biologist who conducted research on the influence of polluted water on DNA alteration within the region, the artist, in his words, “seeks to merge the supernatural with scientific realities” while traversing these interrelated territories.

Wirz will inaugurate Kai Matsumiya's new exhibition space at 264 Canal Street (NY) with a solo presentation opening September 24, 2022.

Environmental Hangover, Kunsthalle Basel, CH, Jan 21 - May 1 2022

For Pedro Wirz’s largest institutional exhibition to date, the Brazilian Swiss artist has created an impressive number of new sculptures and installations, their materiality and motifs drawn equally from organic matter and consumer culture. The clash of the two being the dominant preoccupation in his life trajectory.

“Soil simultaneously portends the emergence and burial of culture, technology, politics, art, everything, until it starts all over again in never-ending cycles.”

Conversation with Elena Filipovic, curator of Environmental Hangover at Kunsthalle Basel, CH

“The monumental hung Soil’s Memory unifies the entire show with its mixture of exuberance and matter-of-factness, bringing to mind both the polychrome facades of Bolivian architecture and Peter Halley’s giant glowing neo-geo paintings. Put differently, it recalls both a cosmic mandala and something like a pinball machine—was there ever a finer summary of the ultimate savagery of Newtonian cosmology than pinball?”

- Adam Jasper, ARTFORUM Critic's Pick

Tooth of a Giant, GALERIE PHILIPPZOLLINGER, Zurich, Nov 2020