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

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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