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

The exhibition Swiss Pop Art at Aargauer Kunsthaus in spring 2017 is the first-ever comprehensive overview of Pop Art in Switzerland. For the Swiss art scene in the 1960s and early 1970s, this international movement was of pivotal importance. Artists such as Susi and Ueli Berger, Fernando Bordoni, Carl Bucher, Emilienne Farny, Bendicht Fivian, Franz Gertsch, Margrit Jaggli, Urs Luthi, Markus Muller, Markus Raetz, and Peter Stampfli took up the trends coming from the US and Britain with great interest. Impressed by the Pop Art movement's provocative images and new motifs, they created works that sometimes borrowed strongly from their models, yet also using them to develop their own artistic language. This new book coincides with the exhibition, exploring the particularities of Swiss forms of Pop Art and looking not only at visual art but also examining various links to design, art in public space, photography, film, fashion, and music. Featuring a wealth of works by Swiss protagonists of the Pop Art movement, it offers as well an illustrated chronology of the period that was politically, socially, and artistically exceptionally lively in Switzerland as much as in many other countries. Swiss Pop Art, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland, 6 May to 30 October 2017.

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Cinema mon amour focuses on the mutual fascination that art and film have for one another. It features work by international artists, including Martin Arnold, John Baldessari, Fiona Banner, Marc Bauer, Pierre Bismuth, Candice Breitz, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, collectif_fact, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Thomas Galler, Christoph Girardet & Matthias Muller, Douglas Gordon, Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler, Samson Kambalu, Daniela Keiser, Urs Luthi, Philippe Parreno, Julian Rosefeldt, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sam Taylor-Johnson, and Mark Wallinger. All of them have engaged with different themes surrounding cinema and filmmaking. The well-founded essays discuss topics such as cinema as space, the film industry, found footage, specific movies and genres, the mechanisms of film, as well as the filmmakers' gaze at art. This lavishly illustrated book, published to coincide with an exhibition at Aargauer Kunsthaus in Switzerland, offers an insight into the allure that film and cinema have on us. Cinema mon amour, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland, 22 January to 17 April 2017.

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Gunther Wizemann, born 1953 in Graz (Austria), came to Switzerland as a child in 1960. He graduated from Zurich's School of Design and has since been working as a painter and concept artist. Studying the Russian modernists raised the question of what he could possibly paint in the aftermath of Kazimir Malevich and Aleksander Rodchenko. Equally, Mario Merz's installation Che fare? or, as Barnett Newman put it, What to paint? were statements that became programmatic for Wizemann's work. The 43 paintings of The Black Garden Wizemann has created between 2003 and 2013 are a possible response to his queries. Done in oil and resin on canvas, they are the result of lengthy artistic processes and a multitude of layers of paint, forming an inner and outer image space. Featured in its entirety for the first time in this new book, the paintings are published alongside essays placing Wizemann's largest series to date in art history. The accompanying texts reveal formal and conceptual relations, ranging from the Renaissance to his contemporaries. Starting from the title The Black Garden they also look at literary and philosophical connotations.

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For her most recent series, Austrian artist Katharina Anna Loidl has reworked steel engravings of Swiss alpine landscapes, transforming the original nineteenth-century prints with an etching needle and burin. By carefully removing parts of the printer s ink, Loidl also removes portions of the landscapes. In their place, she introduces simple geometric shapes, deliberately lacking in distinguishing architectural detail so that viewers are encouraged to imagine the addition of structures of their choosing apartment blocks, industrial buildings, or sports facilities to the idyllic images. Landscape Engravings brings together fifty of Loidl s alpine landscapes. Vitus Weh;s essay examines the sublime and crystalline character of Loidl s art, and Paolo Bianchi looks at aspects of romanticism as a fund, landscape as a sensation, and the art of repetition. By introducing spatial interventions to the idyllic, perhaps idealized, images, Loidl asks the reader to consider the impact of residential and industrial encroachment on the natural world and the value we ought to place on its preservation. "

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Dada began on February 5, 1916, when Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, and others launched the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Cabaret Voltaire would eventually become the stuff of legend, joined by the short-lived but no less less significant Gallery Dada. Even as Dada spread throughout Europe and the world, its heart was always in Zurich. This German language book honors the centennial of Dada by telling for the first time the full story of its genesis and the role played by Zurich and its vibrant community of artists in its creation and flourishing. It sets the early years of Dada firmly in the city''s historical and cultural context and reveals the intellectual and social background that were crucial to the fermenting artistic ideas that culminated in Dada. It goes on to trace the explosion of Dada into a worldwide phenomenon that took in such artists and intellectuals as Joan MirÃ, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau, and Man Ray. Richly illustrated, this book will stand as the definitive account

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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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Over the past thirty years, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has expressed himself on numerous occasions and in a range of contexts about his work and his self-conception as an architect. Many of these statements have been recorded on film. Christoph Schaub, Swiss film director and internationally renowned author of documentaries on architects and architecture, has composed a biographic film collage from this rich legacy of interviews and conversations, lectures, and public talks. It spans Zumthor's entire career from early days in the 1980s until today, including conversations with Schaub recorded for this compilation. This portrait also introduces us to Zumthor as a persona that has changed over three decades, yet still remained much the same man. Authentic, abiding, and passionately he responds to questions about his positions. His statements reveal sensitivity and consistency; they demonstrate a person following his inner compass and ideals. Christoph Schaub has conceived this biographic collage in collaboration with Atelier Peter Zumthor to coincide with the exhibition Dear to Me, curated by Zumthor, at Kunsthaus Bregenz in autumn 2017. DVD has English subtitles.

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Julius Baer, established in Zurich in 1890, is the leading Swiss wealth management group and an icon of Swiss banking tradition. For nearly as long, the founder family has been engaged in supporting visual and performing arts and in 1981, on the initiative of Hans J. Bär (1927-2011), the company began to build its own collection of contemporary art, guided by a firm belief that art in a business environment enhances the culture of discussion and is inspirational to employees and clients alike. Today, the Julius Baer Art Collection comprises more than 5,000 works in a range of media painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and video-by Swiss artists, internationally renowned ones as well as emerging talents. This book offers a survey of the collection that is on rotating display at the bank's offices around the world and highlights its origins and development over the past four decades. Artistic positions of 35 contemporary Swiss artists, such as John M Armleder, Silvia Bächli, Miriam Cahn, Lutz & Guggisberg, Markus Raetz, Shirana Shahbazi, and Roman Signer, are introduced through brief texts and illustrated with some 300 works from the collection.

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Swiss Graphic Design Histories offers an entirely new redefinition of Switzerland''s graphic design landscape. Based on extensive research by scholars of design history and with a multiple and inclusive approach, it reaches beyond the usual canon and the well-know epicentres Basel and Zurich with the germanophone fathers of what has become famous as the Swiss Style in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.In three volumes it features visual artefacts and archival documents, the majority published here for the first time, alongside likewise previously unpublished conversations with designers who have forged developments of the past decades, as well as new essays discussing key terms that refer to various design practices. The complexity of the undertaking is embraced through a system of keywords, thus enabling readers to connect contents within the individual volumes. A fourth volume comprising a glossary, bibliography, and an index of the

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Italian-born American artist Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) was one of the most prolific, innovative artists of the post-war period. Trained at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he met future colleagues and collaborators Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, and Eero Saarinen, he went on to make one-of-a kind jewellery, design iconic chairs, create thousands of unique sculptures including large-scale commissions for significant buildings, and advance the use of sound as sculptural material. His work speaks to the confluence of numerous fields of endeavour, but is united throughout by a sculptural approach to making and an experimental embrace of metal. Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life accompanies the first U.S. museum retrospective of the artist's career to examine the full scope of his broad, interdisciplinary practice, and feature important examples of his furniture, jewellery, monotypes, and diverse sculptural output. Lavishly illustrated, the book offers new scholarly essays as well as a catalogue of the artists numerous large-scale commissions. It questions how and why we distinguish between a chair, a necklace, a screen, and a freestanding sculpture and what Bertoia's sculptural things, when taken together, say about the fluidity of visual language across culture, both at mid-century and now.

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The Soviet Union has left a vast heritage in interior design that is largely unknown in the West. Other than architecture and graphic or product design, interior design from the Soviet era has not yet been thoroughly investigated. For the first time ever, this book offers a comprehensive survey of the country's interior design culture between revolutionary avant-garde and late Soviet modernism. Drawing on archives that were inaccessible until recently and featuring a wealth of previously unpublished material, it documents the achievements of seven decades in the former socialist empire. Soviet design is often discredited as massive, non-ergonomic and monotonous. Yet a remarkable variety of original styles have emerged behind the iron curtain. The 1920s were marked by bold exploration and experiments at Vkhutemas and by constructivism, rationalism, and suprematism. Early in Stalin's reign constructivism was heavily criticised and post-constructivism and Soviet neo-classicism appeared alongside what became known as 'agitational furniture', inspired by the regime's propaganda. The 1930s brought Soviet Art Deco and eventually Stalinist Empire, which has produced some of the Soviet Union's most iconic buildings. In the late 1950s, after Stalin's death, the last Soviet 'big style' originated modernist and functionalist furniture, mass-produced to fit the small apartments in the Khrushchyovka multi-unit housing developments that were built in cities on a large scale. The 1960s mark the Golden Age of Soviet interior design, showing again influences by the early Soviet Avant-Garde and the Bauhaus, while most of the visionary work of a new generation of designers in the 1970s and 1980s remained unrealised.

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The appearance of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus and the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) in the early 1980s and its subsequent rapid spread around the world has left deep marks in society. The illness itself and its effects on society have also caused manifold responses by artists and activists in many countries. United by AIDS, published in conjunction with an extensive group show on the topic of loss, remembrance, activism and art in response to HIV/AIDS at Zurich's Migros Museum of Contemporary Art (Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst), sheds light on the multi-faceted and complex interrelation between art and HIV/AIDS from the 1980s to the present. It examines the blurred boundaries between art production and HIV/AIDS activism and showcases artists who played - and still play - leading roles in this discourse. Alongside images of artworks and brief texts on the represented artists, the book features voices from the past and present. Essays by Douglas Crimp, Alexander Garcia Duttmann, Raphael Gygax, Elsa Himmer, Ted Kerr, Elisabeth Lebovici ,and Nurja Ritter broaden the view of the international discourse on HIV/AIDS and society's confrontation with the disease.

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Carole A. Feuerman is celebrated as one of America's major hyper-realistic sculptors, alongside Duane Hanson and John De Andrea. Born 1945, she was educated in New York and Philadelphia and began as an illustrator before turning to sculpture in the 1970s, which soon earned her much recognition and early success. A pioneer of hyper-realism in sculpture, her work has been displayed in many group shows and solo exhibitions at private galleries and public museums, as well as at the major art fairs, in America, Europe, and Asia. Over five decades, Feuerman has created visual manifestations of stories telling of strength, survival, and balance. She works in marble, bronze, vinyl, painted resins, and stainless steel. Her work is marked by her thorough understanding of materials' characteristics and her ability to control them in the studio. Her subject matter is the human figure, most often a woman in an introspective moment of exuberant self-consciousness shaded by erotic lassitude. Feuerman's works represent a state of female mind rather that an alluring body meant to attract the male gaze. They suggest that women look at themselves differently from men looking at them, that a woman is more innately creative than a man. Many of Feuerman's figures have a fragmented quality, recalling those by Auguste Rodin, and the aesthetics of Surrealism. This is the most comprehensive survey of Feuerman's work in sculpture to date. Lavishly illustrated in colour throughout, it demonstrates the variety of materials and media she uses and highlights the specific qualities of her figures.

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First book to place the art of British sculptor Lynn Chadwick in its international context. Examines in particular the reception and promotion of Chadwick's sculpture in the United States. Richly illustrated. This is the first book to set the work of British sculptor Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003) in its international context. Chadwick, a leading figure in modern British art and celebrated for his innovative steel and bronze sculptures of abstracted, expressive figures and animals, always felt that his work was better understood abroad than in his native country. In this richly illustrated monograph, distinguished British scholar and writer Michael Bird, and eminent American art historian and curator Marin R. Sullivan chart the different phases of Chadwick's long career. They vividly locate his art within the wider narrative of European and American post-war sculpture. They examine in particular the reception and promotion of Chadwick's sculpture in the United States, and how a collection of some 140 of his works at the Berman Museum in rural Pennsylvania came to be.

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City Lust is a timely dialogue between words and images about a crucial moment in our recent history: the apotheosis of globalisation and its current unravelling. In this book, Charlie Koolhaas - an artist, photographer, and writer - takes us to London, Guangzhou, Lagos, Dubai, and Houston, cities in which she has either lived or worked. Her personal and humorous account explores the rapid changes taking place in these culturally vastly different metropolises that are being united by the influences of global trade and the evolution of a shared global culture. A captivating combination of photographic documentary and written testimony, City Lust portrays a global landscape that contradicts the current pessimism to reveal unexpected creativities, connections, and collective references that emerge despite huge global and economic divides.

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