Artist

Peter Fend

In Response to

mMarker, aeronautical chart on museum cardboard, 1990-2019. Courtesy of the artist and Trautwein Herleth, Berlin

Adriatic Plan

marker, aeronautical chart on museum cardboard, 1992. Courtesy of the artist and Trautwein Herleth, Berlin

Birds Reign - Americas

pencil and coloured pencil on paper, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Trautwein Herleth, Berlin

Torna alla mostra

Artist, activist, and critic, Peter Fend resists easy classification. Since the 1970s, his practice has focused on ecology and environmental issues: influenced by Land Art, he develops projects of spatial planning and organization, formulating concrete proposals to improve living conditions on the planet. Within this framework, Fend reconsiders geography and its divisions.

In Birds Reign – Americas, he invites us to take inspiration from the freedom of birds, which – indifferent to hierarchies and borders – undertake long migratory routes across continents and oceans.
Like a global circulatory system, these trajectories traverse frontiers and hemispheres, causing the very notion of nationality to collapse in the face of the vastness of the journey.
In parallel, through his maps, Fend experiments with heterogeneous ways of redrawing territory, at times organizing it by watersheds, at others according to aquifers, with the aim of defining ecologically sustainable units. What emerges is a vision of space that challenges traditional, now inadequate divisions, and calls for a rethinking of territory according to new logics more attuned to the urgencies of the present.

Peter Fend (Columbus, Ohio, 1950) lives and works in New York, Berlin, New Zealand, and Italy. In his practice
he merges conceptual art, activism, and urban planning to address environmental and geopolitical crises. In 1980, in collaboration with a number of different artists, Fend created a corporate entity now known as the Ocean Earth Development Corporation. Fends work has been exhibited in the 47th Venice Biennale (2003), the 45th Venice Biennale (1999), Documenta IX, Kassel (1992) and in numerous shows internationally including at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich (2020), Second Yinchuan Biennale,Yinchuan (2018), Bard Hessel Museum, New York (2018), MUMOK, Vienna (2015), Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus (2015), Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus (2015), Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva (2010), Galerie für Landschaftskunst, Hamburg (2007), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2004).