Karma is pleased to announce Sleeping Stone, an outdoor sculpture project by Swiss-born artist Peter Regli.

Regli is best known for his ongoing project “Reality Hacking”, in which he stages temporary and anonymous interventions in public spaces that confront and resist our preconceived expectations of the contextual relationships between places and objects.

Regli will present a stylized landscape with carefully composed arrangements of marble sculptures depicting pre-historic statues, such as the horse-headed avatar of Vishnu; religious idols, such as the Buddha; popular figurines such as the Japanese maneki-neko fortune cat; and household items, such as a child’s piggy bank—familiar images rendered unfamiliar by their material constitution. The individual sculptures are arranged in groups of five or six, each group representing a sort of tribe of misfits—their gathering suggesting anthropomorphic activity or an unpredictable campaign. The figures, displaced from their usual circumstances and placed in new surroundings, are unified by their material identity and engage in each others differences.

Regli’s use of marble, a medium that is widely attributed to Ancient Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture, signifies classical sculptural techniques and concerns, as well as carrying associations of discerning taste and luxury. By standardizing the material value of these various sourced objects, which have both high and low cultural and production values, Regli levels the playing field between a mass-produced toy and a hand-carved religious idol.
The found object—charged with inherent significance—altered in scale, material and mode of production, parodies expectations and creates unanticipated combinations—ephemeral and monolithic, archaic and new-age, unique and mass-produced. It is a sociological study highlighting intersections of content and context with comical implications.

Peter Regli (*1959, Andermatt, lives in Zurich) studied at the Zurich University of the Arts. Solo exhibitions took place (amongst others) at the following institutions and galleries; Museum Bellpark, Kriens (CH); Katz Contemporary, Zurich; CAN, Neuchâtel (CH) (2010); Helmhaus Zürich (2007); Blank Projects, Cape Town (South Africa) (2006); Centre d’art contemporain, Geneva; Kunsthalle Winterthur (2003). Further, he participated in various group exhibitions such as: Utopics, 11th Swiss Sculpture Exhibition, Biel (2009); Nanjing Triennale (CN) (2008); Le Crédac, Ivry S/Seine (F) (2007); Kunsthaus Zürich (2006); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Chile; Kunsthalle Zürich; Künstlerhaus Dortmund (DE) (2005); Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2003); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2002). www.realityhacking.com