The Yijin Museum hosted a Leuthold solo exhibition in the Spring of 2023. The exhibition was a two-part interactive installation. Part 1: Leuthold invited visitors to walk on his porcelains while viewing a video of his work intermittently dissolving and reconstructing from and into kaleidoscopic abstract patterns and artwork.
Part II: With the resulting shards of Part 1, Leuthold constructed a translucent porcelain sculpture within a glass box inscribed with a text by Rainer Maria Rilke that inspired the title of exhibition, “Unsayable.”
Then, joining Marina Abamovic, Julian Opie and others, Leuthold’s Part 1 was included as a keynote exhibition for the summer-long 2023 “Seeking the CIty ” exhibitions hosted by the city of Datong in Western China.
An expanded version of Part 1 will be included in the upcoming “Pulse of the Hinterland,” 4th Xinjiang International Art Biennale at the Xinjiang Art Museum in the Uyghur Autonomous Region of China during the summer and fall 2024 – curated by Central Academy of Art Museum (Beijing) Director Zhang Zikang.
Leuthold donated the Part II solar powered sculpture to the Chantilly Art Center of Shanghai where it was installed outdoors. The work was a statement about “time” and the cycle of creation, destruction and rebirth.
Critic Mario Cutajar comments, ‘The “Unsayability” of art may also point to its original connection with the Sacred. Per German scholar and philosopher Rudolf Otto (1869-1937), the Sacred is the “Wholly Other” and thus outside of the scope of discursive understanding and only apprehensible by a cognitive faculty open to revelation.’
Leuthold comments, “Brokenness is very much the marker of our age. How and when the inevitable renewal begins is unknown.”
