Search results for ""Scheidegger und Spiess AG, Verlag""

The Never-Taken Images documents a unique long-term project that Swiss photographers Françoise and Daniel Cartier have been pursuing since 1998. They have put together a vast collection of unfixed photographic papers, glass negatives, and films, mostly dating from 1880 to 1990. Samples of these are mounted and displayed, and, exposed to light over the course of several exhibitions, evolve towards colour saturation. Instead of looking at still images, the Cartiers’ installations, titled Wait and See, allow the viewers to perceive a kind of reality for themselves. The book features on around 100 pages the entire test catalogue that the Cartiers have put together to date, showing some 900 different papers and photosensitive supports. These facsimiles offer an almost real impression of their formats, colours, and materiality. Essays by Kathrin Schönegg, photo historian and curator, Thilo Koenig, scholar of art history and critic, and Christophe Brandt, former director of the Institute for the Conservation of Photographs at the University of Neuchâtel, supplement the images and place the Wait and See project in the art historical and technological context of abstract media art. The Never-Taken Images also celebrates the industrially manufactured photo-sensitive support, representing the long central pre-digital period in the history of photography. Text in English, French and German.

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Basel-born architect Max Alioth (1930–2010) was a prominent figure on the Swiss architecture and culture scene. Alioth was a co-founder of Basels’ Architecture Museum in 1984, which in 2006 became the Swiss Architecture Museum (S AM). Together with his wife Susanna Biedermann, he founded the École Supérieure des Arts Visuels (ÉSAV) in Marrakech, Morocco, for which he also designed the main campus building. This first monograph on Max Alioth illuminates his achievements from various perspectives. Selected architectural designs from 1961–2007 are featured in detail through photographs, plans, and texts. These include single-family homes, a retirement home, multi-unit housing, Basel’s Museum of Antiquities, as well as the ÉSAV building in Marrakech. Moreover, the book introduces Alioth also as a visual artist through reproductions of sketches, drawings, and watercolours. Essays by architect Roger Diener, the S AM’s director Andreas Ruby, the director of ÉSAV Vincent Melilli, and art historian and publicist Ulrike Jehle-Schulte Strathaus round out this volume. Text in English and German.

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David Chipperfield’s new building for the Kunsthaus Zürich now stands in all its splendour on Zurich’s Heimplatz, opposite the old museum building of 1910 designed by Karl Moser. Its opening to the public in October 2021 will make the Kunsthaus Zürich Switzerland’s largest art museum. Following the two previous volumes on Kunsthaus Zürich’s architectural history and the design for turning it into an art museum for the twenty-first century, this book documents the genesis of David Chipperfield’s extension from proposal through political debates about the entire project to completed structure. It features a foreword by David Chipperfield and an essay by Christoph Felger, executive architect for the project at David Chipperfield Architects Berlin, that discusses the design concept, the promise made with it, and its fulfilment. A conversation between Christoph Felger, the director of the City of Zurich’s Building Surveyor's Office Wiebke Rösler, and Kunsthaus Zürich’s director Christoph Becker, and architecture critic Sabine von Fischer, as well as numerous illustrations and plans sound out this new volume. Text in French.

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Henry Brandt (1921–1998) was a legendary figure in Swiss postwar film-making, a photographer and a pioneer of the “nouveau cinéma suisse.” His second film Les Nomades du soleil, an ethnographic documentary shot in 1953–54 about a nomadic people in Niger, earned him international renown. At the 1964 Swiss national exhibition Expo 64 in Lausanne, Brandt left his mark on the memory of an entire generation: his five short films La Suisse s’interroge questioned the countries affluent Swiss society in a hitherto unknown form and were the initial spark for the sociologically incisive film-making in francophone Switzerland that later gave rise to masterpieces by Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta. This first monograph on Henry Brandt spans the entire oeuvre of this versatile cinematographer, which includes numerous documentaries, photo reportages, and TV productions. The essays investigate Brandt’s works and provide insights into his efforts to combine the description of the local with the exploration of the distant. The book highlights that Henry Brandt’s commissioned work as well as his own independent productions are critical testimonies to global inequality and thus more relevant today than ever. Text in French.

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What kind of fashion exists without mass production, without Hollywood and international fashion weeks? In Switzerland, far from the international spotlight and the dictates of the major fashion hubs, small labels, collectives, and young graduates as well as established brands test their potential for greatness. Creative designers take initiative and position themselves in Berlin, join the fashion circus in Paris, or establish clever business models at home in Switzerland. Wild Thing - The Swiss Fashion Scene, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, puts a spotlight on this development and the products resulting from it. The book picks up on current topics - such as minimalism and the questioning of assigned gender identities - that shape designs, design concepts, and processes. Lavishly illustrated, it features looks and creations by important labels, selected outfits, textile inventions, and collection presentations. Together with brief interviews, portraits of individual designers, and text contributions, Wild Thing - The Swiss Fashion Scene is a highly attractive snapshot of Switzerland’s creative and vibrant fashion scene. In addition, the book contains links to short print-in-motion videos, which can be watched by pointing a smartphone camera at the corresponding image. The videos offer portraits of designers, interviews with fashion experts, and contributions from fashion schools. Text in English and German.

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When an apple falls to the ground, we see the effect of gravity. Yet not all laws of nature are as apparent. Swiss artist Barbara Ellmerer uses invisible principles of physics, biology, and cosmology as her starting point and translates them into paintings. She sends us into the realm of colours and shapes in which forces, movements, and processes from nature are synonymously realised and palpable. Ellmerer thereby also captures something inexplicable, which reminds us of how steeped in wonder the world still is. Barbara Ellmerer - Sense of Science presents a selection of oil paintings and works on paper created by the artist between 2010 and 2020. Ellmerer’s sometimes large-format pictures are shown both in full as well as in enlarged details to show the intricacies of her brush stroke, colour qualities, surfaces, depths, movements, and emphases. This combination also makes productive use of the migration of media - from painting to photography - and its reproduction in the book. In an accompanying essay, Laura Corman, a quantum physicist, explains how Ellmerer’s art relates to natural science. A contribution by Nadine Olonetzky, culture journalist and photo expert, describes art’s capabilities of rendering invisible processes comprehensible. Text in English and German.

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On the slope of a gentle hill on the northern boundary of the Po basin in Northern Italy stands a remarkable house. A modernist villa in the middle of a park, with its metallic facade shining above an enormous circular base of reddish stone. The extraordinary structure of the Casa Girasole (The Sunflower) follows the way of the sun across the sky - and the inhabitants' vista over the surrounding landscape - during the day, driven by an electric motor that can turn the entire house by 360 . It was built in the early 1930s by the Italian architects Angelo Invernizzi and Ettore Fagiuoli and is an important example of Italian Futurismo in architecture. Preserved entirely in its original state, including the original furniture and curtains, it makes traceable the fascination for modern technology, but also the already slightly broken optimism, of that period. The documentary film 'I Girasole: A House Near Verona' by Christoph Schaub and Marcel Meili enables the viewer to take part in a day at the house that turns around its vertical axis once. The movie introduces both the architecture and atmosphere of the building, its various rooms, furnishings and decoration. It gives a memoir of the house's history and of the time and feeling of life in which it was conceived. The film was awarded the 1st prize at the 1995 biennale Film and Architecture in Graz (Austria). The DVD is complemented by a booklet with introductory essays and illustrations.

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Lawrence Weiner, born 1942 in the Bronx, New York City, is a key protagonist of early conceptual art. His work is characterised by his use of language as an artistic medium. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive and does not instruct the viewer to perform a particular action or interpret a piece in any unequivocal sense. Rather, it presents the viewer with an infinite number of meanings and equally infinite possibilities for realisation. ATTACHED BY EBB & FLOW is an installation Weiner created for Museo Nivola in Orani, Sardina. The title refers to the tides and relates to Sardinia-born artist Costantino Nivola's experience of exile and relocation, as well the current migrant crisis in the Mediterranean Sea. Sentences are translated from English to Italian to local Sardu, using different words and verbal constructs and presented simultaneously to open manifold possibilities to read and interpret: something may be lost in translation, yet much more can be found. Text in English and Italian.

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Doris Stauffer, born 1934 in a small village in Switzerland, was educated as a photographer at Zurich School of Art and Design in the 1950s. Soon she also turned to other forms of art and also began to teach art herself, seeking for new, unconventional ways and methods in art education. In 1971 she was among the founders of a new (and still existing) school of experimental art and design in Zurich. Throughout her life she has also engaged in promoting a feminism that explores new fields and topics, rather than merely aim to reform the existing society and its conventions. This new book for the first time features comprehensively Doris Stauffer's personality, her artistic and educational work and her political engagement. A wealth of images and original documents is complemented by texts contextualising Stauffer's work historically, politically, and within history of 20th century art. Essays by Andrea Thal, Kay Turner and Mara Zust.

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The career of Swiss painter Hedi Mertens (1893–1982) differs in many respects from that of other artists of her time. Following a classical art education in Zurich and Munich, she moved primarily in intellectual milieus that brought her closer to the Constructivist-Concrete art movement, which had an epicentre in Zurich around Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse. Lohse was one of Mertens’ most influential companions and interlocutors, together with Leo Leuppi, Arend Fuhrmann, and Helen Dahm, with whom she shared a deep fascination for the teachings of Indian guru Shri Meher Baba. At the age of 67, Mertens moved to Ticino, in southern Switzerland, where she finally let the manifold sources of inspiration flow into her own art. Within two decades Mertens created some 200 geometric-abstract paintings that urgently await their much-deserved appreciation. This first monograph on Hedi Mertens, published in conjunction with exhibitions at MASI Lugano and the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, brings the masterful art and eventful life of this Swiss painter into focus. It enables the rediscovery of a significant representative of Concrete art in Switzerland who has been overlooked too long. Text in Italian and German.

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Art works created by indigenous people on other continents in European and American museums have become subject of controversial debate. How exactly these collections of tribal art from Africa, North and South America, Asia, and Oceania in rich countries have been amassed over centuries, and how such works continue to be sourced and traded today, is under close scrutiny and claims for their restitution to the places and people of their origin are voiced loudly. Zurich’s Museum Rietberg, one of Europe’s most renowned museums of non-European art, has undertaken an extensive research project to explore the history of its own collection. The essays by expert authors in this illustrated publication investigate the pathways along which objects travelled from their origins to the museum. They shed light at the shifts in meaning of these artefacts that have occurred in the course of the transfers. And they demonstrate the importance of provenance research for learning comprehensively about and taking a critical approach in the assessment of the complex biographies of artefacts. Pathways of Art offers an important contribution to the current debate about the status and impact of non-European art in the global North. It aims to foster awareness of colonial and post-colonial contexts of trading and collecting such art works and to help establishing new, more informed and just, and less Eurocentric, museum narratives.

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In the interwar period, the home of art-lovers and collectors Annie and Oskar Müller-Widmann in Basel was a meeting place for some of the most significant protagonists of modernism, including artists Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The Müller-Widmanns soon became close friends of the couple and the first and foremost collectors of their works for many years. This volume is the first to publish in English the letters and postcards that Sophie Taeuber-Arp wrote to the Müller-Widmanns between 1932 and 1943. Her correspondence revolves around her artistic work, exhibitions, and other projects, but also speaks of the private circumstances of the life of an artist in the period leading up to World War II. Preserved in its entirety, the collection is a core testimony to Taeuber-Arp’s life and work. Walburga Krupp, a leading expert on the artist and co-curator of the major retrospective Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction at Kunstmuseum Basel, London’s Tate Modern, and the MoMA in New York in 2021–22, has annotated the transcribed and translated letters with insightful commentary and picks up on significant topics of this correspondence in an introductory essay. The book is illustrated with facsimile images of numerous postcards and letters as well as with works by Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hans Arp.

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