A groundbreaking, interactive balloon art exhibition has landed in San Francisco. The internationally acclaimed Balloon Museum’s EmotionAir: Art You Can Feel makes its first U.S. visit to the iconic Palace of Fine Arts for a limited run through Sept. 7.
A universal symbol of play
Balloons bring to mind celebrations, birthdays, theme parks, childhood, and other playful spaces charged with positive energy and a sense of fun. EmotionAir: Art You Can Feel features large-scale installations, emotional projections, performance art, and inflatable artworks by renowned international artists, such as ENESS, Michela Picchi, Kalman Pool, and Karina Smigla-Bobinski, who take visitors on an adventure connecting art and emotion.
The exhibition spans 75,000 square feet in the space formerly occupied by the Exploratorium, which has been built out into individual galleries for the 20-plus artists. San Francisco is the first U. S. city to host this contemporary art exhibition and is the fourth city globally to exhibit this unique collection.
The history of the Balloon Museum
Taking inspiration from Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds and Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog sculptures, the Balloon Museum debuted in 2021. It has since traveled the world and is a recognized global phenomenon, welcoming over seven million visitors. The curatorial team realizes the designs in which “air” is the distinctive element. The viewer is placed at the center of an interactive experience with sound and shapes. The art is intended to be touched, experienced, and shared, creating a fluid connection where the work is never static, and the lines between the viewer and art overlap and sometimes disappear.
The art is intended to be touched, experienced, and shared.
‘EmotionAir’
This show is inspired by the Balloon Museum’s popular Pop Air (Art Is Inflatable) and Let’s Fly (Art Has No Limits) exhibitions. EmotionAir took the ideas from these two shows a step further, with an even more ambitious goal of transforming art into mirrors to explore the profound relationship between art and emotions.
The artists push the boundaries of form and space to evoke a wide range of reactions with their inflatable creations. Cyril Lancelin’s Cube Abyss is a series of interconnected shapes — so large they engulf the viewer like an environment — and is a progression between shadows and light, discovery, observation, and a trip into the unknown.
Miranda Makaroff’s trusting Synchronized Chaos exists in a seemingly infinite corridor of brightly colored faces unfolding. For the artist, the corridor of repeated faces is symbolic of the intrinsic complexity of the human mind, self-awareness, and the journey of individual growth.
Alex Schweder’s Aeroton — a word that merges the Greek words for air, aero and sound, ton — uses inflatables to make spaces that are also sound instruments. Conceived as a time-based labyrinth, Aerotron unfolds with fabric columns that lift and fall, pushed by fans shifting the air. Schweder worked with German composer B. Norbert Wuertz so the electric fans moving the fabric columns are digitized into a sonic layer using a custom-built synthesizer. Faux fur adds a tactile dimension and invites visitors to touch, caress, and lay upon the surfaces that lift and lower their bodies as they wait for passageways to open.
“Since its inception, the Balloon Museum has embraced the idea that the most authentic and pure elements of childhood can be transformed into powerful means of expression. This vision, as simple as it is revolutionary, was born as a creative response to the changing international social and cultural landscape,” said Roberto Fantauzzi, CEO of Lux Entertainment.
EmotionAir: Art You Can Feel’s unconventional approach to the exhibition experience fascinates adults, children, enthusiasts, and the curious, and has established inflatable art as a prominent contemporary pop movement.
The Balloon Museum’s “EmotionAir: Art You Can Feel” is open daily through Sept. 7 at the Palace of Fine Arts.