Inflatables are vibrant, bulbous, and bouncing forms of cartoonish art in Jimmy Kuehnle’s world of whimsy, This summer, his blow-up sculptures will take over the Hudson River Museum’s limestone Victorian home, Glenview, as well as the brutalist concrete spaces of its modern wing.The artist’s first big solo show in New York, Tongue in Cheek: The Inflatable Art of Jimmy Kuehnle, finds various inflatables spilling through and out of the building’s various interior and exterior architectures. Kuehnle presents five works, including three new ones, in the exhibition, which runs from June 1st to September 18th.
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The first of the new pieces, Super Punch Bubbles, is an “illuminated clock” featuring bright blossoms blinking to signal the changing of hours. In You Lick Me, I Lick You, Kuehnle shapes his inflatables into tongues that fall from the museum’s entrance arch, while Hot Polyester Bladder Lung will “breathe” and shapeshift throughout the museum.Also filling up the space are two of Kuehnle’s existing pieces. Please, no smash is a gigantic, pink inflatable sculpture that will occupy the museum’s atrium. The other, You Wear What I Wear and Hello Bye, is a wearable inflatable sculpture that looks like an oscillating microorganism blown up to humongous proportions.
“I like titles that make people curious, but also offer the potential for your own interpretation but have some sort of call-to-action,” says Kuehnle. “When I work on projects, I always like to learn things and have new experiences. So I set up challenges, situations that require new techniques.”So while Kuehnle’s sculptures are always fashioned out of vinyl-coated polyester fabric, and then inflated with blowers, each work requires new problem-solving and build processes. He also has to program electronics, which he combines with a more traditional network of pulleys, winches, and riggings.Conceptually, Tongue in Cheek will turn the Hudson River Museum into a living kinetic sculpture. Something that, despite its immobile architecture, will become a breathing and pulsating organism through Kuehnle’s whimsical vision.
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