Zilvinas Kempinas: Fountains

In 2011, Zilvinas Kempinas created a stand-alone sculpture made of strands of magnetic tape vigorously propelled by the force of an industrial fan. The fan is placed face down in the centre of a circle. Since air can only escape from the sides of the fan’s round, metallic frame, it is thrust outwards by the spinning blades, making lengths of black magnetic filament flutter and sway outwards toward the edge of a ring – like waves crashing against a shoreline, or swells of water ebbing and flowing against a barrier. A sculpture in a “non-traditional” sense, with its random transformation of magnetic tape changing its physical form, transcending the material and the piece itself into a fourth dimension that portrays a sense of time and movement in space.

In this exhibition, Kempinas amplifies the irregular oscillations of the magnetic tape into the installation Fountains, using an ensemble of fans. He treats each entity as a unique variable, and iterates it to manifest an identical reality. It is a universe with apparent likenesses that alter themselves in time and space.

Zilvinas Kempinas was born in Lithuania in 1969. He graduated from the painting department of the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 1993, and received his MFA in combined media from Hunter College in New York City in 2002. In 2003, after his solo exhibition at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, he was invited to participate in a series of exhibitions in both the United States and abroad. He received the Calder Foundation’s Calder Prize in 2007, and represented Lithuania at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. He lives and works in New York City.