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Marguerite Saegesser (1922–2011) achieved fame in the US, her
adopted country for many years, where her prints and paintings were
repeatedly shown in group and solo exhibitions in California and
New York over a period of two decades. In her native Switzerland,
however, the artist and her multifaceted oeuvre are yet to be
discovered. This book fills this gap, featuring Saegesser’s art
with a special focus on the monotype, a printing technique
developed in the 17th century and producing only a single original
at a time. It also demonstrates how Saegesser, who initially
studied sculpture in Lausanne, found her artistic destiny in
America. Key to her evolution was San Francisco’s lively art
scene of the late 1970s, and in particular the painter Sam Francis,
an outstanding representative of action painting and abstract
expressionism, who became her friend and precursor. His fascination
with the monotype quickly transferred to Saegesser, who soon
achieved mastery in it and made a significant contribution to the
revival of the historic technique. Text in English and German.
“We dive into Gerber’s worlds to lose ourselves and to find
ourselves again in amazing places.” This is how the Swiss art
historian and acclaimed novelist Paul Nizon characterised the work
of his compatriot, the painter Theo Gerber (1928–1997). Gerber
was a free spirit who has remained largely unknown in his native
country until the present day. This is due to the artist’s own
choice, having rejected the efforts of gallery owners to introduce
his works to the general public. For Gerber, success did not mean
fame and glory, but rather that his art showed a different
possibility from that of his contemporaries. The way in which
Gerber, who roamed between a variety of styles, travelled the
world, and lived with the ethnic group of the Dogon in West Africa
for two years during a creative crisis, upheld his artistic freedom
makes it impossible to assign him to a specific direction in
20th-century art. This book, published to coincide with a
retrospective exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland, is
an overdue tribute to this, in the best sense of the word,
incomprehensible artist and finally provides the general public
with a chance to discover and recognise his oeuvre. Text in English
and German.
Transboundary – Exposing the Porosity of the Concept of National
Borders Reena Saini Kallat’s practice evolves around the tension
between the concept of barriers in a world fundamentally shaped by
mobility and interaction. Exploring the divisive narratives around
national and geopolitical borders and their impact on identity and
self-image for people and their immediate environment, she is also
concerned with social and psychological barriers. That barriers
give way, and can be subverted, is an idea that is pronounced in
Kallat’s work using electric cables twisted to resemble barbed
wire. She uses the paradox of the existence of technology for free
flow of information and restriction on movement. In order to expose
the ambiguity of national narratives, the figure of the hybrid has
come to hold symbolic potential in her practice, as a truant
against dividing lines: Kallat creates hybrids of animals and
plants that are strongly associated with national identity, only to
show that nature defies the violent cleaving through land and
nature, and uses the motif of the river, which is often both,
border and lifeline to both sides. Kallat’s work reveals the idea
of isolation as an illusion, and instead suggests to embrace a
pluralism of cultures.
Clear the ring: The motif of the circus in contemporary art. The
circus presents a deliberate staging of attractive illusions, hard
struggle, success and failure as part of human existence. The
volume assembles works by international contemporary artists who
make use of the motif of the circus in order to examine current
social circumstances and to question cultural and political
structures. The circus originated in London towards the end of the
18th century and has long been a subject of fascination. Today this
place of sensuous experiences seems like a relic from the past. The
circus is a cosmos which with its entertaining and humorous as well
as dark sides provides the basis for an examination of art,
cultural history, animal ethics, feminism and racial criticism and
also for the exposure of structures of cultural dominance,
marginalisation and political and historical filters. ARTISTS:
Kathryn Andrews | Miriam Bäckström | Istvan Balogh | Beni Bischof
| Mona Bosch r | Barbara Breitenfellner | Michael Dannenmann
| Zilla Leutenegger | Dieter Meier | Yves Netzhammer | Tal R |
Augustin Rebetez | Boris Rebetez | Ugo Rondinone | Niklaus Rüegg |
Francisco Sierra | Norbert Tadeusz | William Wegman et. al.
The Bauhaus master Johannes Ittenis one of the prominent
protagonists of early Modernism in twentieth-century art. Few
people are aware of the close links between his beginnings as an
artist and his experience of landscape and nature in the town of
Thun and Lake Thun. Johannes Itten gained decisive impulses for the
development of his concept of art and his path towards abstraction
through various stations and sojourns in Thun and its surroundings.
By means of examples of the representations of nature in his early
work the publication shows in scholarly depth how Itten discovered
his own, very personal and later internationally famous approach to
art and painting style and presents his pictorial transformation of
natureextending through to the artist's late works.
At the centre of Rene Myrha's (*1939) expressive oeuvre lie
landscapes and rigorous compositional room perspectives which are
transformed into stage-like settings. They form the scenery for the
choreography of his figures. Myrha examines them through specific
media in drawings, oil, acrylic, sculpture and reliefs. Born in
Delsberg in Switzerland, the painter encountered the contemporary
movements of art and design during the 1960s in Paris and Milan. In
the foreground of his activities lie forms and volumes which
combine and breakthrough constructed and organically created
spaces. In his later works they are animated by a surreal figural
universe. The publication shows a representative cross-section of
Myrha's oeuvre, from Pop Art to an obsessive preoccupation with a
mysterious and dramatic world of figures.
Public interest in art created by people suffering from mental
illnesses has been growing in recent years, while the topic is
still relatively exotic in the academic world. In a unique research
project at Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK, art works produced
around 1900 by patients in mental asylums and hospitals in
Switzerland have been recorded, documented, and examined. Their
authors worked on many of them for long periods, always with
dedication, and often revealing remarkable technical and artistic
prowess. They saw their art as a contribution to public life, as
their own invention and expression of their ideas, but also as an
act to compensate for the dull life at, and criticism of, the
institutions they were being treated. This field of art, and of art
history, is subject to the dynamics of academic standards and,
consequently, of inclusions and exclusions. This new book,
featuring a manifold selection of previously unpublished art works,
questions our contemporary understanding of art, making the reader
revisit his or her own concept of what constitutes art and to
engage with these artists and their work.
George Steinmann, artist, musician and researcher, is recognised as
an eminent intermediary between art and the sciences in
Switzerland. For many years he has been investigating the relation
between ecology and aesthetics. Many of Steinmann's works are
created in a lengthy process and often involve other artists and
scientists working on trans-disciplinary projects. Call and
Response presents George Steinmann's thinking and working methods
and analyses the development of his oeuvre and his collaboration
with other disciplines. The second part of the book features
selected works from the past thirty years and discusses them in the
context of today's artistic discourse.
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