ARTnews
2017-10-02
Julius von Bismarck is a Berlin-based artist who spent his youth in the desert landscape of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Through photography and sculpture, he investigates how nature is depicted and perceived. In a recent solo show at Marlborough Contemporary in New York, he exhibited a photograph he took in Venezuela of a lightning bolt striking a palm tree in a straight line that seems too fantastical to be real. In this first edition of Catalyst, von Bismarck, speaking via Skype from Berlin, narrates what led up to that pivotal moment and describes lightning’s place in his practice.
Purple Magazine
2016-12-01
MAURIZIO CATTELAN — If you weren’t an artist, what would you be? JULIUS VON BISMARCK — Something that would make more sense in a post-apocalyptic world. Imagine the only thing you can do is art, but there are no white cubes, no collectors, and no one at all interested in art. Maybe some pavilions would still be used for shelter and some sculptures as weapons, but most of the art would be completely useless when it comes to surviving. I think engineer or drug dealer are jobs that are fun and will generate a solid income in both the pre and the post apocalyptic world.
ARTnews
2019-10-17
Last December, news outlets including Fox, ABC, and the Salt Lake Tribune reported on mysterious YouTube videos that showed two exploding rock formations in Utah’s Arches National Park. Some speculated about the scenarios’ authenticity, but the footage looked real enough that the Utah Department of Natural Resources sent staff to assess any possible damage to the landscape. When they found no resources were destroyed, however, authorities concluded that the videos were fake—answering a question posed by a local news report broadcast by Utah’s ABC 4: “Is it real vandalism or a very realistic looking hoax?” The confounding videos proved to be part of a conceptual artwork through which two Berlin-based artists—Julius von Bismarck and Julian Charrière, who previously collaborated on a site-specific performance for the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture—set out to learn how the public would react if protected natural monuments and ancient geological forms were destroyed. The idea for the project—titled I Am Afraid, I Must Ask You to Leave—was inspired in part by recent instances of cultural destruction such as the attacks against ruins in the Syrian city of Palmyra and the monumental Buddha statues of Bamiyan in Afghanistan.
The New York Times
2013-08-13
BERLIN — On a wall in Julius von Bismarck’s studio hangs a large black-and-white photograph of him on a wind-tossed beach in Rio de Janeiro, the long lash of a whip extending from his right arm as waves froth around him. The work has proved to be the most popular from his “Punishment I” series of photographs and films, which show the 30-year-old artist, whip in hand, pitted against the raw forces of nature in various locations around the globe, like a modern Xerxes...
Flaunt
2015-05-13
My landscape is a big scene for you, no? It’s always like you have the inside and you have the outside. So the outside is kind of the landscape you live in your environment. There’s like two parts of it, the natural part and the people part and the society you are in then the world you are in. Art history was always kind of picturing that world you are in. Because now the meaning of landscape changed, the meaning of nature changed, so redoing this is very simple again and again and again. In a different way it makes a lot of sense for me. It’s a different meaning now than it was ten years ago or 20 years ago. Nobody knows what landscape actually means right now. It’s a new kind of meaning that its just getting right now and art always helps to go at what’s important and to give meaning to certain things or to get a feeling or to give a visual to a certain kind of meaning...
