Individual artists, art monographs Books

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisBorn as the youngest of a poor Swiss farming family's seven children, Adolf Dietrich (1877-1957) supplemented arduous farm work and various jobs in a textile mill, as a woodcutter, and railway worker, with art. Gaining increasing recognition in Germany and Switzerland, his participation in the exhibition Les maitres populaires de la realite in Paris, Zurich, and New York in 1937-38 marked his breakthrough internationally. Until today, Dietrich's work is regarded by some as a prime example of 20th-century naive painting, while other scholars place him closer to the post-expressionist movement of New Objectivity. For the first time in nearly sixty years, Dietrich's work has been shown in a vast retrospective at Kunstmuseum Olten in Switzerland, in summer 2015 in which his pictures were accompanied by paintings of artists such as Cuno Amiet, Otto Dix, Giovanni Giacometti, Ferdinand Hodler, Henri Rousseau, or Felix Vallotton. This coinciding new monograph is richly illustrated in colour throughout, featuring some 160 works by Dietrich and the other artists. The essays contextualise his art and highlight Dietrichs' lasting significance.

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Book SynopsisThe work of Austrian-born, Swiss-based artist Othmar Eder is marked by a multitude of materials, media, and formats. However, the passage of time and his personal experiences travelling from place to place are key inspirations behind his creative process. Across his paintings and drawings, motifs related to these themes recur with minor or major variations. Eder also works frequently in photography and video, where his focus is on subtle shifts in structure and texture. Featuring 250 illustrations, Othmar Eder - Finding Images provides a stunning overview of Eder's work, while a preface by Zsuzsanna Gahse and an essay by art historian and curator Katja Baumhoff offer fascinating insights into their conception and creation. The book will bring the work of this important contemporary artist to a wider audience. Text in English and German.

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Book SynopsisSince 1997, artist Claude Sandoz has been sharing his time between his native Switzerland and the Caribbean island of St Lucia. Each time he returns from the Antilles, he brings back chests of sketches and drawings produced during his stay. The island topic provides an assortative focal point for his exuberant work. Sandoz is no longer a tourist, he has 'gone native' at his second home and developed a much more complex relationship with St Lucia than a mere seasonal artist's residence would allow. This moment in Sandoz's art that ethnologists describe as going native is the focus of this new monograph: when own and alien match, overlay with and possibly enrich each other. The book features a vast selection of Sandoz's works, complemented by topical essays and a conversation with the artists. Interspersed poems by Caribbean writers round out the book. Text in English and German.

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Book SynopsisThe most recent work of renowned Austrian sculptor and photographer Werner Feiersinger is an artistic intervention at the Belvedere 21, Austria's national museum for contemporary art, located in the former Austrian Pavilion for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair that had been transferred to Vienna in 1962. For this extensive sculptural work, Feiersinger took cues from the building's history and architectural details. As is characteristic of his work, the Belvedere 21 intervention combined the artist's deep and broad knowledge of design and architectural history with a laconic, minimalist formal vocabulary. Werner Feiersinger. Overturn documents this ambitious project with drawings and photographs, essays, and an insightful interview with the artist. Together, they shed light on the ways in which the Belvedere 21 intervention reimagines the Pavilion as an autonomous object that nonetheless speaks to fundamental questions about sculpture. In doing so, it undermines conventional ways of seeing. Text in English and German.

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Book SynopsisFor more than twelve years, Zurich-based artist Felix Studinka has been observing a chestnut tree near his home and capturing his impressions almost daily in small-format charcoal drawings. Studinka's 'Chestnut Journal' represents an artist's study of our relationship to the world and offers insight into his distinct way of seeing and his approach to reality and to his environment. Published here for the first time is a selection of two hundred of Studinka's particularly expressive drawings from his 'Chestnut Journal'. Alongside the beautifully rendered drawings, the book offers essays by art historian Erich Franz, exploring Studinka's distinct creative process, and literature scholar Marco Baschera, who looks at the artist and his work from a philosophical perspective.

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Book SynopsisSince the 1970s, Swiss artist Manon has been confronting observers with their own vision. Her performances raise question about the boundary between staging and exhibitionism. Always challenging and at times highly subversive, her performances question power structures and put gender identities to discussion. Following-up on the previous volume Manon - A Person, published in 2008, this new volume introduces her work of the past decade to a wider audience. At the core is Hotel Dolores, a series of installations and performances staged at closed-down hotels in the Swiss spa town of Baden between 2008 and 2011. Photographs of venues and Manon's performances are completed by her conceptual sketches and other documents. Concise essays on aspects of Manon's art and vision round out this book. Text in English, French and German.

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Book SynopsisNives Widauer: Villa Nix features a retrospective of Nives Widauer's oeuvre of three decades. The book documents the the Vienna-based Swiss artist's two-part exhibition at Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris and at Kunstmuseum Olten in summer and autumn 2020. The Paris show, titled Antichambre, was a prelude and subsequently integrated entirely into the larger presentation Villa Nix at Kunstmuseum Olten, the latter's architecture allowing the actual experience of seven different rooms at Widauer's imaginary house. As the title suggests, Widauer created for her art a home that is accessible for visitors, who can delve into and explore her imaginary mental spaces and her physical installations and works. Both the villa's and the artist's names are variations of the latin term for snow. The rooms at Villa Nix are intimate, historic and dense spaces in which she arranges a closely selected constellation of her work, thus creating resonating environments as an antichambre, an archive, a garden, or the unknown room. They work as mnemonic spaces and are at the same time rich in historic and cultural connotations while structuring the book like chapters. Introductory texts and conversations reflect the character of these spaces and the artworks they house. Text in English and German.

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Book SynopsisSwiss artist Nesa Gschwend, born 1959 in St. Gallen, merges traditional crafts, such as embroidery, knitting, and sewing, with avant-garde and performative artistic techniques. Widely recognised as one of Switzerland's most distinguished contemporary artists, her art also combines craft with philosophy. Her textile works, material collages, videos, installations, and participatory performances transform individual lived stories into tangible metaphors for collective memory, for human existence itself. This new book features recent work by Nesa Gschwend. The essays explore her approach and describe her humanistic aspiration to transform existential questions into aesthetic reflection. Text in English and German.

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Book SynopsisIn 1913, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and theorist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) experienced powerful visions, often terrifying. However, seeing their great potential value he found ways to encourage further visions and fantasies. Over many years, he recorded his experiences in a series of small journals, added commentaries and transcribed them, using calligraphy and illuminations, into a large, red, leather-bound volume, commonly known as The Red Book. Jung never published the Liber Novus, as he called this pivotal part of his oeuvre, and left no instructions for its final disposition, and it therefore remained unpublished until recently. The Red Book Hours complements the facsimile edition and English-language translation of The Red Book, published in 2009, and draws out insights into Jung's affinity with art as a means of personal insight. Psychologist and multimedia artist Jill Mellick documents copious research into Jung's choices regarding media and technique and his careful design of environments in which he could experience creative processes and allow unconscious content to flow forth. Her unlikely journey includes explorations of memory, serendipity, and science. A stunning interplay of texts and images includes magnifications of the wildly colorful and intricately detailed sketches from The Red Book and a selection of Jung's own pigments, never seen until now, The Red Book Hours presents a more comprehensive picture than ever before of the foundational psychoanalyst's experience and expression of his rich inner world.

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Book SynopsisMinoru Onoda was born in Japanese-occupied Manchuria to a Japanese family in 1937. Before the outbreak of World War II, they moved to Himeji in Japan, which remained the artist's residence until his passing in 2008. Following his artistic education at the Osaka Institute of Fine Arts and at Osaka School of Art in the 1960s, Onoda joined the Gutai, Japan's first post-war radical artistic movement. Gutai challenged what the movement considered a reactionary understanding to initiate new notions of art, and redefined the relationships among body, matter, time, and space. Enchanted by concepts of repetition, Onoda produced panels with amalgamations of gradually increasing dots with relief, creating organically growing shapes, progressing to infinite circles and ultimately moving to a monochrome style in painting. When Gutai disbanded in 1972, he opted for a conceptual style in which the proliferating dots disappeared. The Western world has received Minoru Onoda's art almost exclusively in the Gutai context, for example in the 2013 exhibition Gutai: Splendid Playground at New York's Guggenheim Museum. This overdue first-ever monograph on Minoru Onoda introduces him as an artist in his own right. Apart from investigating his relations with Gutai, it explores his creative process with a particular focus on his sketchbooks. Text in Japanese.

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Book SynopsisSince the late 2000s, German-Iranian artist Bettina Pousttchi has been creating works at the intersection of sculpture, architecture and photography. Her large-scale installations question the history and memory of places, exploring the connections between time and space in a transnational perspective and have gained her wide international recognition and praise. This book features Pousttchi's new photographic installation at Nivola Museum in Orani on the Italian island Sardinia. For this, she chose as her subject the Metropolitan Life Building on 1 Madison Avenue in Manhattan. Criticised for its blatant Italian references at the time of its completion in 1909 and the world's tallest high-rise until 1913, the building displays a hybrid identity, recalling cultural and temporal-spatial dislocations between the Old and the New World, Renaissance and Modernism. Published alongside the images of Metropolitan Life and other works by Pousttchi are an essay by art historian Greg Foster-Rice and a conversation between the artist, critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, and architect and writer Markus Miessen.

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Book SynopsisMax Bill (1908–1994), a key figure of modernism in his native Switzerland and internationally, was a true renaissance man. Equally accomplished as a painter, sculptor, graphic and product designer, and architect, he was also an eminent theorist and educator, curator, and prolific publicist. Moreover, he engaged in Swiss politics and was an activist both in Switzerland and abroad. Throughout his career he connected with fellow artists and other leading figures of modernism, maintaining a lifelong and worldwide artistic and political dialogue. This book, published in conjunction with a major exhibition at Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, takes a fresh look both at Bill’s remarkable achievements across his diverse fields of creative activity and at his international network, highlighting his contribution to art and society as a whole. Max Bill Global features some 120 of Bill’s own works in all disciplines and a selection of his designed products that went into industrial production, as well as work by some of his artist friends. Published alongside are topical essays investigating Bill’s interaction and networking with fellow artists in Dessau, Paris, Zurich, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and New York.

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Book Synopsis

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