↳ Exhibitions

Mark Dion at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

February 26, 2017

Artist: Mark Dion

Exhibition title: The Wondrous Museum of Nature

Curated by: Konrad Bitterli

Venue: Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

Date: December 17, 2016 – September 17, 2017

Photography: © Sebastian Stadler, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

The Wondrous Museum of Nature: The Kunstmuseum St. Gallen is delighted to present the important American artist Mark Dion (*1961 in New Bedford, MA) in a comprehensive solo exhibition. Previously, the museum has shared the Neo-Classicist building by Johann Christoph Kunkler with the Natural History Museum, which has moved to a new building on 11 November. This is why the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen invited Mark Dion to show his works in the newly available rooms on the lower floor of the building, since his oeuvre revolves around ideas about nature and how it manifests itself in the methods of the study of nature and thus in museums of natural history.

With his idiosyncratic artistic “research,” his great passion for collecting, and precise ecological questions, Dion deals with the ancient relationship of human beings to their environment and pointedly questions traditional systems of thought and teaching. With a dark sense of humor, philosophical sharpness, and surprising sensuality, the artist transforms the exhibition space into a series of natural laboratories, museum storerooms, and mysterious hunting grounds. He continually takes on the role of a traveling researcher who explores new worlds with both fascinated curiosity and a fear of the unknown.

At Documenta 13 Mark Dion created an exhibition architecture for the Xylothek Schildbach at the Museum of Natural History in the Ottoneum in Kassel. This wood library (from the Greek word xylon for wood) created in the late 18th century by Carl Schildbach consists of 530 “books” made of indigenous varieties of trees and shrubs. In the expanded Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Mark Dion will now for the first time ever have the chance to intervene in a (former) museum of natural history with his own works and question the existing exhibition structures as well as the implied scientific categories. With The Wondrous Museum of Nature, Mark Dion will realize his own nature collection—a very particular temporary museum of natural history.

Mark Dion, Mobile Wilderness Unit – Wolf, 2006, Courtesy the artist and Georg Kargl Fine Arts Vienna

Mark Dion, The Wondrous Museum of Nature, 2016, installation view, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

Mark Dion, The Marine Biologist’s Locker (Cousteau’s Cabinet), 1993, Hauser & Wirth Collection, Switzerland

Mark Dion, Tropical Collectors (Bates, Spruce and Wallace), 2009, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Courtesy Galerie In Situ – Fabienne Leclerc Paris