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At Perrotin, Gelitin Creates Space for Collective Ludic Experiences

In “All for All,” the Vienna-based Austrian art collective made up of Wolfgang Gantner, Ali Janka, Florian Reither and Tobias Urban reasserts its status as a pioneer of social sculpture, championing an approach rooted in play, emotional engineering and community.

While collective practices are more common in design and architecture, Gelitin represents something of a unicorn in the art world: a group of artists who have worked together for decades while still resisting the label of collective. Emerging in the 1990s, they quickly built an international reputation—cemented in part by their memorably anti-monumental contribution to MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program: the full environmental installation “Percutanious Delight” (1998), which transformed PS1’s outdoor courtyard into a shared space of bodily play and communal pleasure. Since then, the Austrian group has sustained a decades-long investigation into “social sculpture” as a vehicle for triggering emotional and psychological responses—ones capable of reshaping systems of relation and interaction in public space, as well as the processes through which value and meaning are made.

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For more than three decades, Gelitin has pursued a fluid, anti-monumental approach to sculpture rooted in play, collaboration and social interaction. Rather than creating a grand, permanent sculpture, they built a temporary social space centered on bodily pleasure and communal leisure, dissolving the boundary between artwork and gathering place, between the monumental and the communal. Inevitably operating in a context-specific way, their art is situational, existing within the interaction and cooperation between the individual and the collective, the personal and the public. In this sense, their works serve as platforms for testing the possibility of temporary communities and moments of human connection within a collective body.

Their creative process is itself fueled by this spirit of collaboration and continuous exchange. “The amazing thing about Gelitin is that there are four of us, each bringing different ideas. It’s like having eight eyes observing a space and four minds digesting it. There’s all this input from within the group,” Wolfgang Gantner told Observer after the opening of their latest show, “All for All” at Perrotin, marking a long-awaited return to New York.

While he admits that their work is inherently site-specific, they do not remain bound to formal research—reading, analysis or scientific production. “It’s really about observation, something that comes from within us,” Gantner clarified. “In a very simple way, we ask: what are we missing in this place? What would be good for us?”  From there, a........

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