Search results for ""scheidegger und spiess ag, verlag""

Swiss photographer Roland Iselin, born 1958, graduated from the famous photography class at the School of Design in Zurich (today Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK) and also completed a Master's degree at New York's School of Visual Arts. Prior to his artistic education, he completed his studies in socio-cultural animation at Zurich-based Institute of Applied Psychology. Unguided Road Trip is Iselin's latest long-term project. Since 2011, he has been travelling his native Switzerland and his adopted second home country, the US, documenting how in either place the landscape is 'furnished' with all sorts of structures and objects. Bus stops, public toilets, gas stations. We recognise such things and make use of the convenience they offer, yet we forget about them again immediately. In small and densely populated Switzerland, the landscape is cluttered with objects that serve a specific purpose: phone and letterboxes, benches, signposts, wayside crosses. But equally, the vast and scarcely inhabited open landscapes in the US are cut-across by roads lined by mass-produced objects.Iselin has found many motifs common in both countries: memorials for victims of road accidents, cattle gates, rifle ranges with their pavilions, rest stops. A landscape's 'furniture' does not accumulate accidentally. Rather, each object is placed intentionally, and they testify, in a way, to a society's state. Iselin's images demonstrate values and ideals, showing how the design of these objects guides our behaviour. This new book brings together some 140 photographs from Iselin's Unguided Road Trip, for the first time. The images are complemented with texts by writer and photography critic Nadine Olonetzky.

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Haiti has long been known as a benighted place of poverty and corruption. Even before the 2010 earthquake destroyed much of the country, it was beset by difficulties inextricably rooted in its history of rebellion and revolution. Since gaining independence from France in 1804, following the only successful slave revolt in the history of the world, Haiti s past has been characterized by dictatorships, serious conflict, and near-constant social and political unrest, as the country struggles to define its independence and realize its promise. Haiti: The Perpetual Liberation collects 140 photographs of Haiti by Swiss photographer Thomas Kern, taken in black and white with an analogue camera over the course of twenty years of travel there. As the photographs demonstrate, the people of Haiti remain determined to realize the country s promise in the face of crushing poverty and crisis, and, behind the barrage of bad news that dominates its public image, it is a country full of hope and life. The photographs, which make up the first part of a four-part boxed set, are joined by three separate text booklets each in one of three languages: English, German, and Creole that feature texts by Kern on his work and his approach to the country, as well as two essays by Swiss journalist Georg Brunold and Haitian novelist Yanick Lahens that provide context and commentary for the images and discuss the country s people and culture, and its enduring political conflict. A powerful photographic portrait, Haiti: The Perpetual Liberation shows a different, more personal and therefore also more ordinary view of the troubled country that reaches beyond what we think we know about Haiti.

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Since its early days, photography has been both a tool of and subject for scientific research. Developments in photochemistry, camera construction and lense refinement made photography an extremely successful mass medium. At the same time, photography served scientific research as a key medium for observation, documentation, education and communication. ETH-Bibliothek, the main library at ETH Zurich, is holding in its Image Archive vast collections of photographs. Among them is the complete collection of the university's own Photographic Institute, an independent service and research unit between 1886 and 1979. This new book documents both the main aspects of scientific photography, illustrating the research of many disciplines while being the subject of basic research itself. Using a rich selection of images, ranging from astronomical and micro-photography, to laboratory situations and carefully illuminated experimental installations. The introductory essay investigates the interplay between photography and the world of science, and tells the story and changing role of the Photographic Institute.

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Badain Jaran: more than 19,000 square miles of endless openness, sand dunes up to 1,600 feet tall and mysterious saltwater lakes. Badain Jaran is part of the Alashan desert, south-west to the Gobi in the Inner Mogolia province of China. It is a place that has been discovered by American scientists on satellite images in the 1980s only, and that has miraculously been kept hidden to most people since. In 2009 - 12, photographic artist Carlos Crespo realised a vast photo essay on the unique, spectacular, and very remote landscape of Badain Jaran. Crespo had to deal with extreme cold in winter and violent sandstorms in spring and autumn in a barely inhabitable environment. Over time he got in contact with some of the few Mongolian herdsmen living on the fringes of the desert and won their confidence and sympathy. This allowed him also to make portraits of these people and document their way of living. The new book 'Badain Jaran' is meant to make this extraordinary place a symbol and metaphor for all untouched natural sites, reflecting their importance and the necessity of their protection from being turned into ever more tourist attractions.

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The oeuvre of Swiss artist Mirko Baselgia, born 1982, has been carefully selected, using a combination of different materials. With references to architecture, (art) history, and classical music, his sculptural works symbolise, both in form and substance, the relationship between the individual and the environment; while additionally reflecting current sociopolitical issues. Mirko Baselgia ranks among the top most promising young artists in Switzerland. He has recently been awarded the renowned Kiefer-Hablitzel Prize and the Manor Art Award Chur, and the Bundner Kunstmuseum Chur staged Baselgia's first solo museum exhibition in spring 2013. This first monograph presents a range of his work, further illustrated by a conversation between the artist, and curator Stephan Kunz.

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Georg Aerni is a photographic artist with a particular interest in architecture. Educated as an architect himself, he has been working with the camera on this subject with great precision and consistence for the past fifteen years Paris, Barcelona, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Tokyo: each metropolis is also a zone where mankind's will to create is driving constant change. Aerni documents this change in scrupulously prepared and carefully designed series of images. But also when he focuses on receding glaciers in the Alps, his studies of cages in zoological gardens and of mankind's interventions in nature, the extraordinary carefulness and quality inherent to all of Aerni's work is captivating. It sets his oeuvre in sharp contrast to the quickly done, impromptu photography that has become so widespread in recent years. Sites and Signs is the first comprehensive monograph on Aerni's photographic work. The book presents his complete work with an emphasis on the most recent series. Essays on his work in the context of contemporary photography and on images of architecture and landscape, and a complete catalogue of Aerni's oeuvre so far round out the book.

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H.W. Weberhans has been an individualist throughout his career whose art has flourished primarily outside the established art world and its institutions. His art shows great clarity in shape and at the same time puts to question our conventions of perception. Weberhans' work includes sculpture in stone, installations, painting, drawing, video and photography. This book is the first comprehensive overview of Weberhans' oeuvre as a sculptor. It also presents his more recent work as a painter, the 'Schone Bilder' (Beautiful Images), and documents his first major exhibition, 'Affenherz' (Monkey's Heart) in 1985 at the Kunsthaus Zurich, which caused a minor public scandal. Essays on Weberhans' life and work complement the images.

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Marco Graber and Thomas Pulver founded their architectural studio in 1992 after graduating from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) and working with Cruz Ortiz Architects in Seville and Torres & Martinez-Lapena in Barcelona respectively in 1990-91. Since then Graber Pulver Architects, located in Zurich and Berne, have realised many projects for private and public clients in Switzerland and gained recognition nationally and internationally. Their work has been published in numerous books and magazines in Switzerland and abroad. Marco Graber and Thomas Pulver have been lecturing as visiting professors in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich's M.A.-program in architecture in 2006-08, maintaining a close interaction between their method of teaching and design research and the practical work in the studio. "Spatial Sequences and Urban Infrastructure" gives an insight into Graber Pulver's working methods, focusing on their search for the contextual roots and for the specific space and form. The leading idea is that, besides of its natural properties, the infrastructural reservations and links of a territory are crucial for the physical development of our urban landscape. At the same time the form, which has to meet a multitude of demands, is determined by the fact that the quality of a space can be judged and developed only by moving within that space. A second, lavishly illustrated part of the book presents work by students of Graber Pulver's course at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. The topics for the four terms determined concrete architectural tasks and resulted in a vast variety of inspiring and radical solutions. Accompanying essays further investigate the topics of the course and provide additional background information on the student's tasks.

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Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016) ranks among Switzerland’s most distinguished 20th-century photographers. His portraits of artists made his name internationally. Scheidegger’s photographs of Alberto Giacometti at his Paris studio or in his native Val Bregaglia in Switzerland continue to shape the public image of this celebrated artist today. Marking the centenary of Ernst Scheidegger, who was also the founder of the Scheidegger & Spiess publishing house, this book offers a fresh and contemporary look at his multi-faceted body of work. It is based on an extensive reappraisal of his estate and features a concise selection of iconic and lesser-known images that demonstrated Scheidegger’s prowess as a portraitist. More importantly, however, the volume enables an encounter with Scheidegger’s hitherto little-published early work and thus undertakes a reassessment of his entire oeuvre. Essays by Tobia Bezzola, art historian and director of the MASI Lugano, Alessa Widmer, curator and artistic director of Photo Basel art fair, and Helen Grob, Scheidegger’s long-time companion, trace his career and self-concept as a photographer. A biography and brief texts on a selection of key examples of Scheidegger’s art round off this beautifully designed photo book.

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Alberto Giacometti (19011966), one of the most significant figures in 20th-century art, was throughout his life closely attached to his family, and in particular to his parents Giovanni and Annetta Giacometti, in their native Swiss village of Stampa. At least once a week he wrote to his parents to keep them up-to-date on everything important to him, maintaining this routine even when a telephone was installed at their house in the remote Val Bregaglia. Their entire correspondence comprises more than 1,000 letters.For the first time ever, excerpts from this body of documents are now published in this volume. They reveal fascinating insights into this close family relationship and the manifold exchanges about core issues of Alberto's life and work as an artist. The letters tell of his artistic education in Switzerland and the early years in Paris his studies at the art academy and encounters with the avant-garde, his joining with and later turning away from the Surrealist movemen

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For centuries, the Alps were an almost insurmountable barrier on the way from Europe’s north to the south, and vice versa. The Romans replaced some of the ancient narrow transalpine mule tracks with their famous roadways. Paved roads were introduced in the 19th century, soon followed by railroads with impressive bridges, viaducts, and tunnels. Today, 120 safe and comfortable highways and roads, as well as high-capacity railroad lines, serve as indispensable transit routes for Europe’s people and economies. Without these passages, Switzerland would be an entirely different country: socially, culturally, economically, and militarily. Through some 80 large-format colour and black-and-white images, Alpine Passes of Switzerland demonstrates the boldness of the country’s modern Alpine crossings, their infrastructure and beautiful landscapes. Additional historic photographs convey earlier generations’ courage and pioneering efforts to build the roads and railtracks that connect Europe’s nations. Supplementary essays trace the history of the Alpine passes and highlight their significance for Swiss national identity, explain their military importance, and describe the vision that preceded the construction of new base tunnels across the St. Gotthard and Lötschberg massifs between 1994 and 2016: the future of rail transit across the Alps lies deep underground.

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Swiss artists Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann have been collaborating since 1990, gaining much international recognition as Lang/Baumann (or L/B). Their collaborative work comprises installations, sculptures, murals, and floor paintings, as well as architectural interventions. Models play a key role in their creative process. This book brings together for the first time all the models that L/B have made for the projects they have pursued over 33 years. It thus forms a complete catalogue of their oeuvre to date in miniature format, featuring also those projects that were never developed beyond the model stage. A model can serve three purposes: three-dimensional sketch, test of a concept, or presentation. L/B use all three types. The sketch model is quickly made, fragile, and merely manifests a thought. The working model is used to try to test formal or technical details. The presentation model is made to show the result once the design process is complete, and this is usually elaborately built. Some 120 colour illustrations are supplemented by two essays on iconography in Lang/Baumann’s work and on the playful aspect of model making. A conversation with Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann rounds off the book.

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For more than 25 years, Swiss architects Bernhard Aebi and Pascal Vincent have been running their practice with offices in Bern and Geneva. Housing is one of the firm’s main fields of activity, yet it has also won a number of high-profile public commissions, such as the restoration and reconstruction of Switzerland’s national parliament building in Berne, the renovation of the Swiss National Bank’s Berne headquarters, and the south wing of Zurich’s main train station. The images by photographers Adrian Scheidegger and Alexander Jaquemet, both longtime companions of the architects, demonstrate how the spaces they created gradually and naturally integrate with their environment. Writer Gianna Molinari joined Scheidegger and Jaquemet on their expeditions to Aebi & Vincent’s buildings. Her literary snapshots supplement the images in this volume, stimulating our imagination of the inner life of these structures and their occupants.

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In recent years, painter and legendary art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi has opened a new chapter of his career. The core of his latest work is an extensive series of paintings, titled The Greats, that have been put on sale as digital artworks using NFT technology. Its starting point was the Salvator Mundi, a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and sold in 2017 in an auction at Christie’s in New York for $450m to an unknown buyer. Beltracchi studied the picture meticulously and created several hundred versions of the motif in a variety of styles, ranging from high renaissance to pop art, or depicting Jesus in the personification of Mick Jagger or Mao Zedong. The result is a fascinating game of deception with the disputed painting and its symbolism. This large-format book combines photographic insights into Beltracchi's everyday life in the studio by renowned Swiss photographer Alberto Venzago with a documentation of The Greats collection. Texts are contributed by Stanford University professor emeritus Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, German philosophers Peter Sloterdijk and Markus Gabriel, German journalist Ulrike Posche, German finance executive Leonhard Fischer, Swiss-based cryptocurrency and NFT expert Hansen Wang, Swiss art dealer Guido Persterer, and Alberto Venzago. A conversation between Beltracchi and Swiss writer and philosopher René Scheu rounds out this volume that describes and interprets the phenomenon of this extraordinary artist from a range of perspectives.

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Swiss artist Rochus Lussi, born in 1965, examines the individual’s existence in the mass. Issues of vulnerability, sensitivity, and defensibility are also key topics of his art, for which he mainly employs the mediums of sculpture and installation, but also drawings and performance. This first monograph on Lussi offers a broad survey of his work from 30 years, featuring small and multi-part installations, wood sculptures, works on paper, and photographs of his performance actions. The human figure is at the core of his early works, yet over time this begins to dissolve, and forms from everyday life, structures, draperies, surfaces of different body worlds come to the fore. The comprehensive visual presentation of Lussi’s oeuvre is supplemented with essays contributed by art historians, curators, and art educators. Text in English and German.

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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.

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Drawing occupies a prominent place in the work of Paul Klee (1879-1940). Klee attached great importance to drawing and in particular to the line as the principle from which the realisation and visual generation of an idea emanates. This aspect is also a core interest of collectors Sylvie and Jorge Helft, who over almost five decades have assembled some 70 of Klee's pencil, pen and pastel drawings, as well as watercolours, etchings, and lithographs, which the artist has created between 1914 and 1940. The Helff’s Klee collection forms an extraordinarily coherent whole. This book, published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana (MASI) in Lugano from 4 September 2022 to 8 January 2023, features for the first time this unique selection from Klee’s oeuvre. A conversation with Sylvie and Jorge Helft by MASIS’s director Tobia Bezzola and essays by philosopher Francisco Jarauta, art and literary critic Juan Manuel Bonet, and art dealer and curator Achim Moeller supplement the full colour plates.

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Alfredo Häberli, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1964 and has been working from Zurich since the 1980s, is one of the world's most widely acclaimed product designers. Major international brands such as BMW, Camper, Georg Jensen, Iittala, Luceplan, Moroso, Schiffini, or Vitra are among his clients, for whom he has designed furniture, lamps, objects, tableware, or even entire interiors. Häberli''s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions throughout Europe and has earned him many awards over the years.In the first of this book's two volumes, Häberli looks back at the people, places, and objects that have influenced him and shaped his ideas and creative process. He tells of his visits with the great Italian designers, the British and American role models influencing him, and about inspiring exchanges with colleagues such as Konstantin Grcic, Jasper Morrison, or Patricia Urquiola. Moreover, his encounters with visionary entrepreneurs, and the places, locations, and objects that

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Dominique Bondy, born in Zurich in 1946, created an extensive artistic oeuvre starting in her youth, and later also alongside her studies of comparative literature and Romance philology and her work as a psychoanalyst. It comprises pen and ink drawings and paintings in an art brut style, as well as surrealistic collages. In the 1980s and 1990s her works were displayed in several gallery exhibitions in Zurich. This is the first book to be published about Bondy’s art. The volume highlights what Bondy is concerned with in her artistic work: tracing her own life in order to find herself. The full colour plates are accompanied by Bondy’s own poems, which she writes in French, English, and German, some of which were written specifically for this book. The text contributions come from the writer and philologist Iso Camartin and the art historian Marianne Karabelnik. Reflections on her biography and art by Dominique Bondy herself round out the book. Text in English and German.

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Swiss artist Mirko Baselgia, born in 1982, already made a name for himself internationally in the first decade of his career. Baselgia works within the context in which he lives and with the conditions available to him. His works appear to be calm and soulful, unassuming and endless. They invite the viewer to pause and reflect on their place on planet earth. Philosophical and scientific questions are reflected by means of the local, natural, and recycled materials Baselgia uses. This book offers a snapshot of Mirko Baselgia’s current creativity and is published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Kunst(Zeug)Haus Rapperswil-Jona. Its subtitle )in(out) till sundown refers to a quote by the Scottish-American author John Muir (1838–1914): “I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” Baselgia’s art also stimulates reflection on the meaning of inside and outside, the boundaries that separate us from our surroundings, as well as their permeability. Text in English and German.

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Paper has been irreplaceable for centuries in the communication and transmission of knowledge. In spite of the digital revolution, paper remains an essential vehicle for the production of art, whether in drawings, painting, the creation of objects, or in the context of site-specific installations. In the urgent need to give material substance to our ideas and experiences, we capture them on paper. In the artistic treatment of this medium, our cultural practices are transcribed onto the paper along with the intended messages. Sur Papier. Su Carta explores paper as a unifying element in the encounter and confrontation of artistic practices with different cultural origins. It opens up a dialogue in which hybrid identities and the cultural spaces between East and West are negotiated, as illustrated by working processes and works on and with paper by Sivan Eldar (USA), Mingjun Luo (Switzerland/China), Francine Mury (Switzerland), and Jiang Zuqing (China).

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In recent years, Swiss artist Franz Bucher, born in 1940, has produced an extensive series of paintings which he simply titles Fields: lavender, dandelion, rapeseed, and poppy fields congruent with the canvas to form a pictorial field. Yet Bucher’s objective is not primarily the pictorial. Rather, it is more about the two-dimensional space which is given an inherent structure by the largely monochromatic primary colours he uses, as well as his dynamic brushstroke. It becomes apparent that most of the artist’s oeuvre since the early 1970s has been determined by the metrical rhythm in his use of colour. Bucher’s paintings constitute actual energy fields. This new monograph offers a retrospective of Bucher’s entire body of work from the vantage point of his recent pictorial fields. It thus illustrates his true artistic intentions independently of the context of his chosen motifs. Text in English and German.

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The Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, one of the most renowned photography museums in Europe, has awarded the Prix Elysée biannually since 2014. Young photo artists are invited to submit a photo book project with the prize being the realisation of the winning submission, which constitutes a major step in an artist-photographer’s career. This book documents the Prix Elysée’s fourth edition. It features the work submitted by the eight nominees Alexa Brunet, Arguine Escandón & Yann Gross, Magali Koenig, Thomas Mailaender, Moises Saman, Assaf Shoshan, Alys Tomlinson, and Kurt Tong. Sketches, first drafts, and photographic studies illustrate the progress of their projects, from initial concept to image selection and design. Conversations with the artists published alongside reflect on their close collaboration with the museum and expand on the visual portfolios. The individual creative process thus becomes visible, and at the same time, a cross-section of contemporary art photography production emerges. Text in English and French.

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A pioneer of the Nouvelle Tapisserie (New Tapestry) movement, Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930–2017) revolutionised the practice of weaving in the 1960s. She elevated this craft to the status of sculptural expression, using the possibilities of organic fibers such as wool, sisal, and linen as living, malleable materials to realise her artistic vision based on the observation of nature and man. Her spectacular wall-mounted and spatial woven works made her name internationally and marked several editions of the Biennale of Tapestry, held in the Swiss city of Lausanne between 1962 and 1995. This French-language book illuminates the crucial role that Lausanne played at the beginning of Abakanowicz’s international career and in her artistic explorations. Her reflections and creative paths are juxtaposed with places and encounters in Lausanne and the rest of Switzerland: the Bienniale of Tapestry and the Alice Pauli Gallery, local patrons and collectors of art, scholars, and friends. Text in French.

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South African sculptor Angus Taylor, born in Johannesburg in 1970 and alumnus of the University of Pretoria, is known mainly for his monumental works. For these, in addition to the classic bronze, he uses a selection of materials special to his immediate environment: black granite, red jasper, straw, and the red earth of the Pretoria region. In the symbiosis of these materials with traditional artistic craft techniques, distinctly contemporary works arise, which Taylor pioneeringly positions as figurative landmark sculpture. This first-ever monograph on Angus Taylor offers a comprehensive survey of his oeuvre to date. Key works from his entire career since the founding of his studio Dionysus Sculpture Works in 1997 are featured in full colour illustrations throughout. The essays discuss Taylor’s methods, practices, and personal philosophies and put his work is context within South Africa’s social situation as well as with his own biography. The book offers a much welcomed profound introduction to Angus Taylor’s innovative and characteristic body of work.

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While completing the Almannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in southern Norway in 2016, celebrated Swiss architect Peter Zumthor asked Norwegian scholar Mari Lending to engage in a dialogue about the project. Departing from the ways in which Zumthor's pavilions frame the barely visible traces of the industrial exploitation of zinc in the 1890s, the conversation took unexpected turns. In meandering, impressionistic style and drawing on Zumthor's favourite writers, such as Johann Peter Hebel, Stendhal, Vladimir Nabokov, and T.S. Eliot, their exchanges explore how history, time and temporalities reverberate across the famous architect's oeuvre. Looking back, Zumthor ponders on how a feeling of history has informed his continuous attempts of emotional reconstruction by means of building, from architectural interventions in dramatic landscapes to his design for the redevelopment of Los Angeles' LACMA on a grand urban scale. This small, beautifully designed new book records the conversation between Zumthor and Lending, illustrated with photographs by the renowned Swiss architectural photographer Helene Binet.

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Paintings from the Indian subcontinent bedazzle the viewer with their minute details, colours and aesthetic qualities. Relatively modest in size, they often illustrate historical events, religious texts and poetry, or document life at court. Painted with watersolved pigments on paper, they invite closer observation and allow insight into the artistic traditions of India. "A Secret Garden" is the name of an outstanding private collection of Indian paintings. It comprises works spanning seven centuries from the time of the Sultans (1206-1526) through to the nineteenth century. This new book features a selection of 105 artworks from Danielle Porret's collection. Each entry provides a stylistic analysis of the painting as well as a discussion of the subject matter by leading experts in the field of Indian painting. Museum Rietberg Zurich is one of Europe's leading museums for non-European art.

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This book is a unique and intimate portrait of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. "With this volume I wish to document Giacometti's personality from a completely different standpoint. I do so using photographs taken almost continuously from 1943 up to the time of his death; these were the twenty years in which his art became well-known. Alberto Giacometti's nature, work and thoughts fascinated me and other friends tremendously. I was one of the lucky ones allowed to experience his life. My encounters with him, and the resulting photographs, were of a more intimate, personal sort. Giacometti was not a legend to me. I treasured his absolute will for freedom. He was often cunning and harsh with his judgements and opinions, yet at the same time sensitive. His contradictoriness - often described by others - to me represented an expression of his personality, fervent existence and presence. I loved and respected this man. I believe his work belongs among the most important works of the contemporary art scene." - Ernst Scheidegger.

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Luminous, with a silken glow and soft to the touch, yet harder than steel, created by nature and shaped by human hand: no other material has been more highly valued in China for millennia than jade. Since humanity’s earliest days, magical properties have been attributed to the mineral. As a burial gift it confers immortality and is said to improve health when given as medicine, as a talisman it bestows good fortune and protection. It is hardly surprising that jade objects became sought-after collectables as early as the 10th century. Zurich’s Museum Rietberg is home to an exquisite collection of Chinese jade objects spanning four millennia. In his striking images, Zurich-based photographer Felix Streuli brings them to life and makes them glow. The images reveal the most intricate details and make these works of art almost tangible to the viewer. This book features around 60 of Streuli's outstanding photographs, supplemented with concise texts on the objects they show and an introduction to the history of Chinese jade art. Interspersed short stories and poems revolving around the mythical gemstone and a reflection on the photographer’s gaze round out this carefully designed picture book. Text in English and German.

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Giovanni Segantini’s (1858–99) three paintings La Vita—La Natura—La Morte (Becoming—Being—Passing) of 1898/99 do not reveal at first glance anything about their equally complex and interesting background. Originally planned for the 1900 Paris Exposition of 1900 as a gigantic, multimedia “Alpine symphony” panorama 722 ft long and 66 ft high, Segantini was forced to reduce his work to three purely pictorial main paintings, owing to a lack of financial means. When he died in 1899, whilst still working on it, he left behind an incomplete triptych that was intended to embody “the spirit of nature, of life, and of death.” In this book, Swiss art historian and Segantini-expert Juerg Albrecht traces this monumental landmark piece in the artist’s oeuvre as one of the last programmatic works of fin de siècle art. Apart from its genesis, the book explains, as well the cycle of life and death that the three paintings visualise, whose origins Segantini sought both privately and creatively in the mountains of the upper Engadine valley during his lifetime. Text in English and German.

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Swiss artist Zimoun enjoys significant international renown for an oeuvre that he has been creating over a period of some 20 years. Zimoun uses kinetic principles of rotation and oscillation to set things in motion and generate sounds. He uses mundane, unspectacular materials and conventional industrial products. For his works, he develops small, minimalist apparatus that generate tonal and visual complexity when activated, despite their fundamental simplicity. These mechanical contraptions are often used hundreds of times in the installations, creating visual and acoustic spaces with fascinating power and poetry. This book presents 65 of these location-specific installations that Zimoun realised between 2009 and 2021 in various art galleries and museums around the world. The full-page images are supplemented with brief texts by international authors, who outline a variety of perspectives on Zimoun’s work. Two concise essays consider and position his oeuvre in the wider international and art historical context. QR codes provided with all the images extend the book by enabling the direct playback of video documentations available online on smartphones or tablets, thus offering the reader the additional dimension of sound and movement — the essential elements of Zimoun’s art.

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Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) is far more than just the creator of the iconic fur teacup. In the course of her career she produced a complex, wide-ranging, and enigmatic body of work that has no parallel in modern art. Like an x-ray beam, this book scans Oppenheim’s artistic oeuvre, bringing its variety, playfulness, and poetry to the fore. Instead of simply answering the riddles posed by these intriguing works, it maps out the paths that will lead us to still more clues. Simon Baur is a leading expert in the life and art of Meret Oppenheim. The nine new essays featured in this volume are at once scholarly and easy to read. In them, Baur shares the many fascinating insights and interpretations that he has gleaned from his decades-long engagement with Oppenheim’s work. The result is an anthology that combines both biographical and thematic aspects and takes us on an exciting journey into the poetic cosmos of a truly great female artist.

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Charlotte Perriand is one of the foremost figures in twentieth-century interior design. Together with her collaborators Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier, she created many pieces of furniture we now consider classics, including the instantly recognisable LC4 chaise. Her pioneering work with metal was particularly instrumental in paving the way for the machine-age aesthetic popular throughout the 1920s and '30s. The third volume in a four-part series, this lavish book covers the years between 1956 and 1968. During this period, Perriand established a relationship with the Galerie Steph Simon, which exhibited and published some of her most iconic work, as well as that of renowned contemporaries Serge Mouille, Georges Jouve, and Jean Prouve. Perriand also completed several high-profile projects throughout the 1960s, most of which have been published here for the first time. These include comprehensive designs for Air France's offices around the world and the renovation of the Palais des Nations, where many of her designs for furniture and the assembly halls she decorated remain in use and relatively unchanged to this day. This new volume also documents her intimate, yet little known, links to Brazil. Covering key moments in Perriand's personal life, as well as the iconic styles she developed, this third volume in the series comes complete with annotations and a bibliography for further research.

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Whether Old Masters or young Swiss art, whether printed or drawn: with holdings of more than 160,000 works on paper, the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich, the famous university’s collection of prints and drawings, is one of the largest and finest of its kind in Switzerland and internationally. Albrecht Dürer, Maria Sibylla Merian, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Pablo Picasso are represented alongside contemporary greats such as Louise Bourgeois, Miriam Cahn, Fischli/Weiss, Urs Lüthi, and Shirana Shahbazi. Founded in 1867 as a classical academic study collection, the archive serves today as a focal point for scholars and art-lovers alike, and as the means for exchange between the university and the public. This lavishly illustrated book takes readers on a fascinating journey across six centuries of art history, featuring some 300 of the collection’s highlights. An introductory essay on the history and evolution of the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich and brief texts on 40 selected works accompany the illustrations. The volume is rounded off by personal statements by contemporary artists and researchers from various disciplines, who testify to and comment on the significance and topicality of the collection’s holdings.

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The work of artist and stage designer rosalie is marked by aspects of an innovative transgression of limits. It has been shown in numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums, mainly in Germany, and has been featured also at international art fairs, such as Art Basel, Art Cologne and Art Frankfurt. rosalie has also created a number of large-scale projects for public space in several German cities. rosalie has gained particular recognition also for her work for the stage and projects she has realised with musicians. Light as a medium, light-art is a key aspect of rosalie's work in recent years, and has become an independent complex with her oeuvre. With her large-scale, striking kinetic light-sculptures, using new and innovative technologies and materials and recognised by a growing international audience, she has created a wide range of "new universes of light". 'rosalie Light-Art' presents her spectacular light-art projects and interdisciplinary works including music and scenery for the first time in a large-size illustrated book that also includes a DVD with short film presentations.

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Open House discusses the topic of temporary housing in architecture, art, design and humanitarian aid. The phenomenon of tiny houses fascinates and is currently trending in various media. In times of large migratory movements from poor to rich countries there is also an urgent demand for temporary housing in many places. Eighteen international authors explore the intentions behind such constructions, their underlying principles and the lifestyle they convey. Their contributions reveal how these concepts relate to the very notion of habitat, to space, to pragmatic criteria, as well as to the time in which they are elaborated. Moreover, addresses various issues of individual housing through the featured original installations, and spatial experiments. Open House is published in conjunction with a two-year research project and an open-air exhibition of the same title in Geneva in summer 2022. Book and exhibition comprise around 40 designs by artists, architects, designers, architecture schools and research institutions, as well as humanitarian organisations, such as Andrea Zittel, EPFL Laboratoire ALICE, Global Shelter Cluster, Gramazio Kohler Research at ETH Zurich, Jean Prouvé, John Armleder, Kengo Kuma, Kerim Seiler, Matti Suuronen, Maurizio Cattelan and Philippe Parreno, the UNHCR, and others. Text in English and French.

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Isabelle Cornaro, based in Paris and Geneva, holds degrees in art history and visual arts. She has a strong interest in experimental cinema and devotes herself to the narrative, symbolic, and economic origins of things. In her work she assumes an anthropologist-type manner to investigate people's seemingly fixated attachment to emotionally charged, even fetishised objects, creating large stage installations and short movies. This book is part of the new On Words series that presents conversations with contemporary women artists. Through them, readers come to understand the sources from which they draw inspiration, the themes in their work, and their view of the world. Edited by Julie Enckell, Federica Martini, and Sarah Burkhalter and bringing together a wide range of viewpoints, the On Words series adds a new narrative to polyphonic art history as told by those who actively shape it. Text in English and French.

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Jun Kaneko, born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1942 and based in Omaha, Nebraska, since 1986, is revered for his role in establishing modern ceramic art, yet he has been equally prolific in a range of other media. This book offers an entirely new and detailed survey and analysis of nearly six decades of Kaneko's work in ceramics, drawing, painting, installation art, and opera design. Tracing the career of this dynamic artist from his early training and subsequent association with the pivotal California Clay Movement to his important public commissions and philanthropic concerns of the present, it focuses in particular on the past 20 years, which have previously not been the subject of a comprehensive volume. Drawing extensively on interviews he has conducted with Jun Kaneko since 2002, Glen R. Brown reflects on the principal concepts that have shaped Kaneko's art, situating them in the space between a Japanese Shinto ethos and the aesthetic tenets of Western Art Informel and Post-Painterly Abstraction. He discusses in-depth Kaneko's art, from the colossal glazed-ceramic Dangos to the sensitive colouristic stage and costume designs for operas. The book provides fascinating insights into Kaneko's unique, relentlessly self-sustaining creative process and the multiple conceptions of space that inform it. Featuring more than 200 colour illustrations and substantial information not previously available in published form, this book offers an up-to-date definitive critical survey of this important artist's life and work.

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Hong Seung-Hye has garnered a unique position in the Seoul art scene with her bravado in defying conventional borders. She sees no restraints in crisscrossing the border between the abstract and the figurative, the plane and the three-dimensional. Nor does she shy away from employing public spaces just as freely as she experiments inside a white cube. This first monograph on Hong traces the trajectory of her prolific oeuvre. It features four essays written by distinguished Korean critics, curators and educators who have closely witnessed and worked alongside Hong throughout the past two decades. Originally written in context with solo exhibitions, each of which marking a milestone in her career, they offer individual starting points to delve into and read Hong's art. Ranging from her earliest paper collages to the most recent videos reinterpreting Snoopy from iconic comic strip The Peanuts, this book illustrated with some 200 colour plates provides a comprehensive survey of Hong's versatility.

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Swiss graphic designer Lea Michel has chosen for her book the single most often impersonated figure in Western movie history: The President of the United States. Taking 164 fictitious presidents, male and female (for the first time in Curtis Bernhard's comedy Kisses for my President of 1964), it charts the range of actions of the world's formerly most powerful person - making statements or giving speeches, standing in front of or sitting behind the desk at the Oval Office, climbing out of or into limousines, wearing dressing gowns. Six presidential typologies - Father and Husband, Villain, Alien, Clown, Hero, Lover - sorted by 241 sub-categories, such as Shaking Hands, Looking Shocked at a Screen, or In a Video Conference with a Terrorist. Taken from films and TV and online series, such as Dr. Strangelove, Independence Day, or House of Cards, as well as from many lesser known productions, they also highlight the intense relationship between fiction and reality in a time where the incumbent president exploits all media to an unprecedented extent to market himself and to increase his popularity.

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Situated on the shore of the Lake Zurich, Le Corbusier's exhibition pavilion is his last realised design. Based on his Modulor proportional system and at the scale of a single-family home, it demonstrates the potential of prefabricated elements to form a perfect space for art and design. Commissioned in 1960 by Heidi Weber, Zurich-based gallery owner and patron of Le Corbusier the visual artist, this structure in steel and glass represents pivotal aspects of his architectural philosophy and also points to the future. Architects Silvio Schmed and Arthur Rüegg have carefully restored the Pavillon Le Corbusier to its original state, including the reconstruction of missing pieces of furniture and luminaires. This book documents their research and the restored building, featuring previously unpublished historic photographs and documents alongside newly commissioned images by Georg Aerni.

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Founded in 1841 and located since October 2019 in a striking new building by celebrated Spanish-Italian architects Barozzi Veiga, the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne (MCBA) is one of Switzerland's major public art galleries. It is home to an impressive permanent collection spanning eight centuries of art history that comprises manifold works by Swiss and international artists. This compact guide introduces 212 works from all periods represented in the collection with image and a concise text about its history and reception. An essay on the museum's development over 170 years as well as an index of artists round out the book.

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Danish artist Michael Kvium, born 1955, works in painting, prints, drawing and watercolour, and sculpture, as well as performance and stage design. His paintings and graphic works often resemble comic strip art or extensions of 17th-century Baroque paintings, depicting the more negative aspects of Western culture. Motifs include grotesque monsters, half man half woman, sometimes approaching self-portraits. He is expressing himself in a personal world of images. His works seem familiar, making the viewer smile at one time and causing disgust at another, yet in their strange way all sharing this familiarity. Kvium defines and expresses his wholly personal and unflinching understanding of powerful human presence in an area unexplored by others. This first comprehensive monograph takes the reader through Kvium's entire career since his beginnings in the 1980s. It reveals the various lines in his work from early experiments as a young artist in the world of bikers to an outspoken critic of our current Western society.

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Since 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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In 2018, Israel marks the seventieth anniversary of statehood. Yet the events of 1948 are remembered very differently by the Palestinian people, who to this day carry the memory of the Naqba, the displacement of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians from their territories during the 1948 Palestine war. In the seven decades since, there has been no lasting agreement to sort out the volatile political and social situation in the region, which looks likely to remain for many years to come. Unresolved is the most recent photo-essay by renowned Swiss documentary photographer Meinrad Schade. A continuation of his War Without War project, in which Schade documented the lingering, damaging marks of war on the former Soviet Union, Unresolved explores the obvious traces of conflict and the scars it leaves on both the people and landscapes in Israel, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip. Yet even more importantly, Schade brings home to the reader the sometimes more hidden symbols that can be found in daily life and that are simultaneously result and catalyst of the struggle. The captions - in English, German, Hebrew, and Arabic - highlight historic and current aspects of the conflict and invite readers to view it from different perspectives. Text in English, German, Arabic and Hebrew.

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