At Perrotin, Gelitin Creates Space for Collective Ludic Experiences

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.

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 dialogue begins between the four of them. “Something gets digested, and what comes out is—hopefully—strong enough for all of us. And if it’s strong enough for the four of us, then it’s strong enough to be realized.”

Gantner and the group tend to resist rigid labeling and classification, emphasizing their identity simply as artists producing sculptures and artworks. Labels such as “social sculpture,” he suggested, are often applied retrospectively by others. “For us, working in the public realm is really about asking what’s missing—what we feel is lacking in a place, and how we can respond to that situation,” he reflected, noting how site-specific thinking plays a central role in their process. It extends beyond the physical site, however. “It’s about the society around it—how people live and interact there. Maybe that’s why others call it social sculpture.”

At Perrotin, the group presents watercolors and drawings from a recent project, WirWasser (UsWater), the permanent public fountain they created in Vienna. It was conceived as part of a newly developed district of Vienna, Gantner explained—an intervention within an as-yet undefined urban condition, close to a street, at the edge of a park, without a clear identity. “They wanted a fountain, but we thought, let’s use that idea to create a social space: a place where people can meet, sit and spend time together, while also engaging with the artwork.” With its circular, playful environment composed of multiple sculptural elements, the work invites movement, interaction and informal occupation.

“The idea was to add something that helps generate a kind of square—a place to sit, to stay,” he pointed out. “Of course, it’s not fully there yet. The grass still needs to grow; these things take time. But you have to start somewhere. It’s like placing furniture in a space—once people begin to use it, things start to develop.”

The project exemplifies both Gelitin’s method and the role of community engagement as an integral part of the sculpture. Surrounding it is a ring of seemingly grotesque yet playful characters that are both sources of entertainment and functional elements: water flows from their hands, mouths or limbs and circulates back into the shared basin. Nothing is contained by an external structure; instead, all elements participate as vehicles of collective action. The group also carefully calibrated the water jets—high enough to mask the traffic noise but quiet enough for conversation. “In the end, it’s about creating something for people—a place where they can feel comfortable, happy, and connected to the scale of it,” Gantner said. “We like the moment of surprise—not making something that simply persuades you to engage, but something you genuinely want to experience… Our ethos is that we should create something you yourself want to see—something that’s missing. We try to bring in alternatives to produce what isn’t there yet, what we feel is lacking and want to encounter. That desire is what gives you the energy to realize the work.”

Gelitin’s sculptures, like this fountain, are often anti-monumental in their refusal of stability, embracing a fluid notion of form that can morph and adapt in relation to the complex systems of relations into which they are inserted. Positioned within the legacy of Situationism, their sculptures are “non-orientable,” intentionally defying any single correct orientation and remaining subject to continuous transformation. Their forms are malleable and playful, triggering the instinctive creative curiosity often left behind in childhood.

The ludic aspect is a key strategy for Gelitin, one that allows a return to a dimension of open-ended creative interaction with the world. “This ludic attitude is really important to how we work,” Gantner agreed. “In a way, we’re like kids in a sandbox, playing with our tools. If you see someone building a bigger sandcastle, you want to build one that’s even bigger—or try to top it. That playful energy is definitely there.”

Their inclusion in an upcoming exhibition in Denmark titled “Homo Ludens” underscores this alignment, suggesting a curatorial recognition of play as a critical framework for their output. For Gelitin, adopting a ludic strategy enables a departure from strictly rational or functional modes of thinking. Rather than solving predefined problems, it opens a space for empathetic engagement that invites alternative logics and unexpected uses—approaches that diverge from efficiency-driven models and instead privilege imagination, speculation and the reconfiguration of purpose.

Their practice echoes architectural historian Roy Kozlovsky’s description of the relationship between children and the adventure playground in terms remarkably similar to participatory art: “Children introduce content and meaning to the playground through their own action… It induces the pleasure of experimenting, making and destroying.” This is very much how Gelitin’s approach to art-making and public space can be described—as a form of humanist and emotional engineering, one that proceeds from observation and listening within the social field.

Informed by this approach, their practice unfolds over time as an accumulative process in which ideas, forms and intuitions may resurface years later. Gelitin operates as a continuously evolving organism, shaped by multiple perspectives and shared authorship as much as by the human contexts in which it operates, in a continuous process of negotiation that characterizes any social agreement.

Roles within the group remain fluid and situational, often determined by circumstance rather than hierarchy. The collective is the result of this continuous process of exchange, sharing and negotiation, and a deliberate refusal to specialize allows each member to move across materials and methods—wood, metal, clay—preserving a breadth of influence and preventing repetition. Difference and adaptability, rather than efficiency and specialization, become the drivers of their ongoing creative evolution. An unpretentious, humorous approach—a refusal to take themselves too seriously—is an equally fundamental leveling tool, one that defies the myth of the artist-genius and furthermore collapses distinctions between them and their audience.

This ethos extends to their exhibition-making. Frequently treating gallery spaces as quasi-institutional environments, they foreground production, duration and performance. Yet this latest show at Perrotin operates differently, turning the space into a performative site and, more precisely, a social field that requires the presence and movement of viewers rather than the artists themselves. All for All is a series of playful hand-formed ceramic face tiles that gave the exhibition its title. Originally conceived for a public school in Munich, each tile is a character in a crowd of distinct individuals; each student could choose one and identify with it or creatively appropriate it. The aim was presence rather than instruction, plurality rather than singularity.

For the New York presentation, the tiles are shown in two distinct configurations. In one space, they gather in clusters, emphasizing collective form. In another, they appear as a linear sequence of single faces stretching across the wall. The arrangement mirrors how the group perceives the metropolis: extreme proximity of bodies paired with frequent isolation, lives running parallel without necessarily intersecting—together, yet alone. In this way, the work resonates with the city itself, with its people, its social dynamics and the coexistence of individuals and groups. “This piece didn’t need us performing next to it—it needed people to move through it, to mix with it,” Gantner said. “People understood it, responded to it, even bought individual tiles or groups of them.”

Underlying Gelitin’s practice is ultimately a resistance to singular ambition. Rather than pursuing a fixed idea, they cultivate a multiplicity of possibilities within the studio, conceived as a space of ongoing experimentation—what Gantner described as a “playground.” From this evolving mental library, works are activated in response to specific contexts. Openness, adaptability and a commitment to sustaining creative pleasure ultimately guide Gelitin’s process of observing and creating for a humanity whose social and emotional needs are in continuous evolution. “We try to stay open and, importantly, to stay happy. We don’t want to chase one idea to the point of frustration. Instead, we keep multiple possibilities alive, so that when the right space or opportunity comes, we can respond to it.”

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