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

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

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Sigfried Giedion (1888-1968) and Carola Giedion-Welcker (1893-1979) were among the most distinguished and influential scholars of art and architectural history during the 20th century's earlier dacades. Of particular impact was their role in connecting leading protagonists of modernism in architecture, art, and literature, such as Alvar Aalto, Hans Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Breuer, Max Ernst, Walter Gropius, Barbara Hepworth, Le Corbusier, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, or Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The discourses they initiated, for example on the New Vision in photography or a 'Synthesis of Arts', have lost nothing of their relevance and provide new starting points through to the present day. The estate of Sigfried and Carola Giedion-Welcker is today kept in Zurich at ETH Zurich's Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, the Swiss Institute for Art Research, the University of Zurich's Institute of Romance Studies, and the James Joyce Foundation. It comprises some 16,000 letters, 10,000 photographic prints and negatives, a wealth of other papers, and a vast library. This new book offers a re-evaluation of Sigfried and Carola Giedion-Welcker's work, impact, and lasting significance. The editor and contributors were the first to draw fully on the estate, which has been opened entirely to researchers only recently. Featuring a vast number of previously unpublished documents and other images alongside excerpts from the extensive correspondence the two maintained with their artist friends and colleagues in academia, it provides a unique and manifold insight into the 'Giedion universe'.

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In 1911, Le Corbusier (1887-1965) and his friend August Klipstein (1885-1951), a scholar of art history and later renowned art dealer, undertook a grand tour of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, and Italy. While Klipstein's interests were more focused on research for his doctoral thesis, Le Corbusier's impressions were more immediate, his mindset more romantic. They both kept a diary of their journey and produced many sketches, drawings, watercolours, and photographs en route, sometimes capturing the same motif and even copying each other's work. While Le Corbusier's record was published in 1966 as Journey to the East and has become a classic, Klipstein's testimony of the expedition remained largely unknown until today. In this new book, Ivan Zaknic explores the creative symbiosis of this friendship and what the two ambitious young men brought back from their trip. Richly illustrated, including reproductions from both of their diaries, and featuring the complete text of Klipstein's diary as well as that of the little known correspondence between Le Corbusier and Klipstein, the book offers an entirely new perspective of this seemingly well-known undertaking. It introduces the personality of Klipstein as well as lesser-known facets of the very young Le Corbusier.

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Colombia is a land of natural beauty and rich cultural heritage, of rainforests and rivers, of peaceful rural farms and ranches where farmers and gauchos gather for work and leisure. But behind these images of bucolic serenity, the people of Colombia live through considerable hardships. Poverty is prevalent in many isolated parts of the country where state authority is largely absent, and seventy years of armed conflict between the Colombian army, right-wing paramilitary forces, and left-wing guerrilla groups, such as the FARC and the ELN, continue to leave lasting scars. The country's central role in the cocaine trade both provides for and threatens the livelihood of many Colombians. The culmination of almost twenty years spent traveling throughout and photographing Colombia, Colombia: Al borde del paradiso features more than one hundred incredible photographs by Luca Zanetti. What the images collectively portray is a place that teeters between paradise and the abyss, a wildly colourful and chaotic backdrop to the stories of everyday people's lives. Arranged thematically in several sections, the book also includes an essay on the historic, political, and social context of the conflict by Colombian sociologist Alfredo Molano, who followed closely the peace negotiations of 2012–16 between the Colombian government and the FARC and who is a member of the truth commission established as part of the peace agreement signed between the rebels and the government; brief introductory texts by Medellín journalist Anamaria Bedoya Builes; and a postscript by Luca Zanetti. Text in Spanish.

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La Gara is an 18th-century country estate in Jussy, a village near Geneva, Switzerland. The buildings have been carefully restored by Swiss architect Verena Best, who also added inspired touches to the interior design. The renowned Belgian landscape designer Erik Dhont reinterpreted and subtly redesigned the gardens and surrounding grounds, completed by a palindrome-like labyrinth designed by Swiss artist Markus Raetz. This new book tells the full story of the La Gara estate and illustrates its beauty. The essays investigate various aspects of its preservation and restoration of buildings and gardens and the contemporary interventions. They highlight features such as the historic watering system for the gardens and the fishponds and look at the specific Genevan garden tradition and characteristics of the rural landscape around Jussy with its biodiversity. Moreover, they contextualise La Gara with the 'ferme ornée', a villa with agricultural and ornamental features following ancient Roman models. The beautiful volume is rounded out with newly commissioned photographs by renowned Swiss photographer Georg Aerni. Text in French.

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This new book, published to coincide with an exhibition at Kunsthaus Zurich in summer 2017 offers an overview of the development of Mexican graphic art between the late 19th-century and the 1970s, ranging from figurativism to early abstract works. It features around 50 key works on paper, printed using a range of techniques, that deal with issues such as poverty and wealth, love and cruelty, and the poetry and hardships of everyday life. In addition to prints by Jose Guadalupe Posada, there are characteristic Realist works by Leopoldo Mendez, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros as well as abstracts by Rufino Tamayo and Francisco Toledo. Revolutionary ideas and engagement with socio-cultural and socio-political concerns play a key role in the history of Mexican art. The members of Taller de Grafica Popular, a people's graphic art workshop established in 1937 by a collective of international artists in Mexico, produced flyers and posters for the masses supporting trade unions, popular education and socialist issues in the country. Their editions exemplify the typical Mexican tradition of black-and-white woodcuts and linoleum prints. The images depict Mexican life and the customs and characteristics of its indigenous populations, but also include the country's first forays into abstract art. The images are complemented by an introductory essay and brief texts on the artists and featured works. The Mexican Graphic Art exhibition runs from 19 May to 27 August 2017, Kunsthaus Zurich.

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Fritz Block (1889-1955) was one of the most dedicated proponents of Germany's postwar New Building movement. From 1929, he also used the medium of photography to express the impulse of modernism along the ideals of New Objectivity and New Vision, travelling as a photojournalist to Paris, Marseille, and North Africa, as well as in 1931 to the United States. Being of Jewish origin, Block was banned from working as an architect and publishing his photographs in Germany by the Nazis in 1933. He subsequently turned entirely to photography on extensive trips abroad, and eventually emigrated to America in 1938. After his arrival in Los Angeles, he focused on colour slides for educational purposes that characterised his work from 1940 to 1955. He produced a particularly innovative series depicting California's architectural modernism, which was widely distributed throughout the United States. The first book on Block's work in photography features a vast range of images from his entire career. Vividly illustrated with some 450 photographs, including many in full colour and published here for the first time, Photo-Eye Fritz Block demonstrates Block's significance in modern photography.

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'M Selection' features a selection of works from the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art's collection by 27 Swiss and international artists. It examines the artists and their works and puts them in context with various artistic movements from the second half of the 20th century: Pop Art, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Land Art, Performance, Photography and conceptual Art, Feminist and Appropriation Art. The fully illustrated book gives brief texts on the featured works. Two introductory essays on the entire collection and the exhibition concept complete the book. 'M Selection' is published to coincide with an exhibition at the Musee Rath in Geneva. Artists featured include: Marc Camille Chaimowicz (French), Cosey Fanni Tutti (British), Thea Djordjadze (Georgian, working in Germany), Hamish Fulton (British), Douglas Gordon (British [Scottish]), Mathilde ter Heijne (Dutch, working in Germany), Daniel Knorr (Romanian, working in Germany), Sol LeWitt (American), Babette Mangolte (French, working in the USA), Bruce Nauman (American), Gerhard Richter (German), Markus Schinwald (Austrian), Katharina Sieverding (German), Alina Szapocznikow (Polish, worked in France), Oscar Tuazon (American), Andy Warhol (American), Stephen Willats (British), Christopher Wool (American), and others.

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Hans Josephsohn, born in 1920 in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), came to Zurich via Florence as a Jewish immigrant in 1938. In more than six decades he has created a sculptural oeuvre that transcends the fashions and fads of the art world and yet testifies to his incomparably sensitive understanding of our age. This comprehensive monograph introduces the reader to Josephsohn's approach, outlines his development and places him within the development of twentieth-century art. The book shows the fascinating uniqueness and the tense calm of an oeuvre that offers many young artists an attitude to art that mirrors their own concerns. AUTHOR: Gerhard Mack is the arts editor of the Sunday edition of the "Neue Zurcher Zeitung" and the author of numerous essays and publications on art and architecture, literature, and theatre." 136 colour, 92 b/w illustrations

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In August 1968, the Pakistani foreign minister visited Beijing and presented Chairman Mao with a crate of mangoes. Apparently, Mao immediately sent the mangoes, a fruit unkown so far in China, as a gift to the 'Worker-Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams' deployed into Quinghua University to put down warring factions of Red Guards and occupy the campus, with the implicit political message that workers were now made managers of education. The exotic fruit were then distributed over the following weeks to various factories. Thus the mangoes, perceived as coming from Chairman Mao, transformed from mere fruit into near-divine symbol. They were celebrated by the workers as tokens of Mao's love and compassion and worshipped as a kind of religious relic. The Golden Mango powerfully symbolised the slogan "The working class must be the leaders in everything", and soon appeared on all kinds of household products. The new book Mao's Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution illustrates how factory workers tried to preserve Chairman Mao's precious gift, how the mango transformed into a religious symbol, and how the political spectacle of the 1968 National Day Parade featured the mango.

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Felix Nussbaum (1904-44) was a German painter of Jewish descent, murdered in Auschwitz by the Nazis. After more than four decades in oblivion, his native city Osnabruck in northern Germany brought this distinguished artist to light again by opening a museum dedicated to his oeuvre, the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus. The artist's work, life, and fate resonates in this expressive structure that was designed by celebrated American architect Daniel Libeskind. German artist Brigitte Waldach, born 1966, has produced an impressive body work, mainly of large-format drawing and voluminous installations. Existenz (existence) she conceived especially for Felix-Nussbaum-Haus, where it has been on display since December 2018. It consists of three-dimensional drawings, excerpts from Nussbaum's letters, and a sound collage, involving the viewer in a dialogue with his paintings. This book documents the environment Waldach has created within Libeskind's architecture to reflect upon and experience Felix Nussbaum's art from our contemporary perspective. Text in English and German.

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Austrian artist Manfred Wakolbinger, born 1952, trained as a metal worker and tool maker before turning to art. Following first steps in jewellery design, he moved on to sculpture and photography, later also to video art. Many of his sometimes voluminous sculptures were created for public spaces. The submarine world has captured his particular interest in photography and video. Wakolbinger's art is organic and conveys an inner poetry, yet it remains enigmatic even when it becomes concrete and figurative. This book features a selection Wakolbinger's works in photography and sculpture since 2012, accompanied by a conversation between the artist and curator Jasper Sharp. An essay on the topic of language in his art by scholar and critic Cornelia Offergeld and a text by celebrated Austrian novelist Christoph Ransmayr describe and interpret the recent oeuvre by one of Austria's most distinguished contemporary artists. Text in English and German.

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Masks evoke scenes of carnival or African tribal rites, we may be thinking of death masks of famous people, theatre and fashion, cosplay, disguise, and of protection. They represent some of the most ancient and most controversial objects of our cultural history. Today's artists look beyond the mere object, they are interested also in the social, cultural, and political meanings of masks. This book, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau in fall 2019, explores their appearances in contemporary art. Artists at all times have been attracted by masks and their symbolism. Through works by distinguished Swiss and international artists and concise texts the book demonstrates manifold approaches to the topic of masks. With contributions by Yasmin Afschar, Daniel Berndt, Hendrik Bundtge, Emily Butler, Wendy Chang, Michelle Cotton, Peter Fischer, Claire Hoffmann, Olivier Kaeser, Melitta Kliege, Susanna Koeberle, Elsy Lahner, Leo Lencses, Bettina Muhlebach, Lena Nievers, Lucia Rey, Hermant Sareen, Joerg Scheller, Madeleine Schuppli, Angela Strecken, and Thomas D. Trummer. Text in English and German.

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All across Switzerland, in smaller towns like Schaffhausen or Biel as well as in larger villages such as Altdorf or Buchs, there are local public theatres, restaurants with a stage, or multi-purpose halls. This part of the country is second home to Beat Schlatter, actor-comedian, playwright, and the person behind one of Switzerland's most famous faces. For some thirty years, he has travelled Switzerland in every direction to perform his own programmes and to appear in shows, and he has rested, changed, and made-up his face in hundreds of these places that offer some form of a back-stage. When on tour, Schlatter takes photographs of these usually dull transitional spaces where A, B, and C celebrities and local stars and starlets await their appearance. This new book, featuring around 300 of Schlatter's images, is a testimonial to the moderate tristesse and the well-intended fruit bowl inherent to all these spaces, no matter how conventional or hilariously extravagant they may seem. Text in English and German.

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Walter Mittelholzer (1894-1937), pioneer of aviation and co-founder of Switzerland's legendary airline Swissair, is chiefly revered as an accomplished aerial photographer. His spectacular views of the Swiss Alps have been very popular ever since he began publishing them in the 1920s. Much lesser known today are his expeditions by plane to distant places. In his day, he proved to be a keen marketer, selling the images he took on travels to Spitsbergen (Svalbard today), Persia (Iran), and Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in his self-written books, in movies, and to the press. His 1926/27 trans-Africa journey on the seaplane Switzerland from Zurich via Alexandria to Capetown made his name known internationally, both as an aviator and a photographer. Well respected entrepreneurs and bankers funded Mittelholzer's undertakings, supporting his goal to promote air travel in Switzerland. The entire Mittelholzer archive is now held as part of ETH Bibliothek's special collections in Zurich. This latest volume in the Pictorial Worlds series revaluates Mittelholzer's media activity from today's perspective. It features some 200 of his outstanding photographs. The complementing essay looks at the patronising view of Africa and its people and cultures the aviator-photographer maintained and provides an account of the colonialist backdrop of Swissair's lift-off in 1931.

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The mythic figure of Prometheus has inspired many poets, painters and musicians since the age of romanticism. For Goethe and Henry Fuseli, the titan who stole the fire from the gods of ancient Greek became the embodiment of mankind struggling for autonomy and self-determination. Yet the fire has come not only to our benefit. Along with it came also menace upon mankind. This is the subject of a major work by Venezuelan artist Javier Tellez. In his film installation 1/2 Rotations (Prometheus and Zwitter) of 2011, two sculptures slowly rotate before a camera: Arno Breker's (1900-91) Prometheus and Zwitter (hermaphrodite) by the German art-brut sculptor Karl Genzel (1871-1925). Both works were on display in the Nazi propaganda art shows of 1937 in Munich, Breker's in the Great German Art Exhibition and Genzel's in the coinciding defaming show Degenerate Art. This new book juxtaposes paintings and drawings reflecting the Prometheus myth by Henry Fuseli with Javier Tellez capital work of contemporary art. It is published to coincide with an exhibit at Kunsthaus Zurich in summer 2014.

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German-born artist Thomas Mullenbach plays with our everyday perception of the normal and well-known and undermines ourcollective ideas of sense, value, and purpose of the visible world. To this end, the now Zurich-based artist explores the discipline of art history and puts the possibilities and limits of painting up for discussion.This lavishly illustrated new monograph features a range of Thomas Mullenbach's paintings and drawings. Published inconjunction with a recent exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich, it focuses on Mullenbach's more recent works, many of which hecreated especially for this show. Essays by Elke Bippus and Juri Steiner and a conversation between curator Beatrix Ruf and Thomas Mullenbach complement the illustrations.

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Leipzig-born photographer Margret Hoppe is a promising new voice in European photographic art. This new book features her series Apres une Architecture, a photographic perspective of Le Corbusier's architecture that refers to his concept of a modern architecture laid-out in the book Vers une architecture (Toward an Architecture) of 1923. Hoppe's images show Le Corbusier's use of exposed concrete, the clarity of his geometric shapes and the emblematic polychrome surfaces as symbols of his buildings. She investigates what remains today of these visions of architectural modernism, now that its legacy in many cases is adored as a monument rather than actually used and appreciated as a functional piece of architecture. The photographic image transforms the buildings into signs of a highly pictorial and sculptural aesthetic, enabling manifold views at Le Corbusier's work in the present day. The book also presents a selection of Hoppe's photographs of international modernist buildings, alongside two essays and a conversation with the artist. It is published to coincide with a solo exhibition at the Museum der bildenden Kunste in Leipzig.

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Markus Raetz is one of the most renowned contemporary artists in Switzerland. Initially educated and working as a primary school teacher, he became an artist in his early twenties. Since the 1970s, his work, including solo exhibitions, has been been on the international stage. Raetz works with a variety of materials and media. The phenomenon of perception is his main focus, rather than how something is represented. Prints form a major part of his work. Markus Raetz.The Prints 1951-2013 covers his complete body of work in this genre.; the Catalogue Raisonne is complemented by a separate volume, with essays on his work and artistic development. Exhibitions: Museum of Fine Arts Bern, early 2014 (date TBC). Markus Raetz is represented with works also in the permanent collections of museums such as: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel; Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (Main); San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla CA; Tate Gallery, London; MoMA, New York; Musee national d art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Schaulager, Munchenstein near Basel; Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

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Hubert Looser, entrepreneur and patron of the arts, has put together an outstanding collection of modern and contemporary art. The focus of Looser's interest is Abstract Expressionism, Minimal Art, and Arte Povera. The collection also includes classical modernists, as well as Asian and African sculpture. The Hubert Looser collection will be given to Kunsthaus Zurich as a long-term loan in 2017. This book is published to coincide with the first exhibition of key works from this highly significant Swiss collection at Kunsthaus Zurich in summer 2013. It features paintings and sculptures by artists such as John Chamberlain, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Elsworth Kelly; Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Sean Scully, Louis Soutter, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and others. It also offers an insight into Looser's private space, his home and garden, as a setting for masterpieces of 20th and 21st-century art.

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Jules Spinatsch ranks among the foremost contemporary Swiss photographic artists. Many of his projects, although controversial are thought-provoking and internationallly recognised. Since 2003, he has been working on his Surveillance Panorama Projects; shot with network cameras, these works create awareness for social habits and show the sometimes striking discrepancy between illusion and reality. In Vienna MMIX, he focused on the famous Vienna Opera Ball; from the opening of the doors at 20:32hrs, until the end of the dance at 05:17hrs, using 2 cameras to complete duel rotations, capturing an image every few seconds, an incredible 17,352 in total. Jules Spinatsch. Vienna MMIX-10008/7000 presents this fascinating social study in two volumes. Volume 1 shows 10,008 images, combined into a single chronological sequence; panoramic views that recreat the entire space, yet show only fragments of events. Volume 2 presents a selection of 70 images, documenting single moments of great intensity or intimacy, in fascinating close-up detail. It is a striking collection, documenting a range of human behaviour in a public space, over a relatively short period of time, in a very specific arena.

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For more than 20 years, photographic artist Tobias Madorin has been working on his series Topos. Metropolises like Barcelona and Sao Paulo, a Swiss mountain resort like Grindelwald, or foreign countries like Uganda, Indonesia and Japan: with his large scale images he explores dwellings and landscapes. Madorin creates tableaux, similar to 19th-century painters. His particular interests are places where people gather, places on the outskirts of cities along arterial roads, waste disposal sites, or areas changed and scarred by agriculture and mining. He understands such places as products of human visions and ideals, but also as result of exploitation and greed, as sites of fight for survival. Tobias Madorin - Topos is the first monographic book on Madorin's work, presenting his most important pictures from twenty years. An essay by the journalist and art critic Nadine Olonetzky comments Madorin's oeuvre and puts it in context of contemporary photography and the history of representing landscapes and cities.

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As an effect of the recent economic and financial crisis in the USA, a vast number of people have suddenly lost their jobs and income and often also their home. Many of them still live in their cars or even just in the streets. In spring 2007, the young Swiss photographer Eberhard began talking to some of these homeless people and invited them to his studio to take a portrait of them. He paid them a fee and built a relationship with these individual personalities that can be traced in his photographs. Eberhard's In Good Light series shows a sensitive and respectful approach to difficult situations of life in which these people find themselves, in most cases through no fault of their own, sometimes by their own choice. They are impressive personalities who have kept their dignity and show great power despite the struggle of living on the edge of society. Eberhard's images are complemented in the new book by an introduction by curator Karen Sinsheimer and a literary essay by the celebrated German novelist Bernhard Schlink.

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In the work of artist and artistic researcher Hannes Rickli, video and audio recordings originating from research in scientific laboratories (videograms) play an important role. Videograms are a category of moving images produced in an operative context by measuring cameras and microphones. This kind of audio-visual commodity has so far been largely neglected by artists as well as by image scientists. For his work-in-progress Spillover Rickli has put together since 1992 vast collection of such audio-visual lab reports. Rickli has also initiated also a research program on this topic at Zurich University of the Arts. In close exchange with biologists and image scientists Rickli investigated the material to enhanced his understanding of and work with it for his artistic project. This resulted in a series of video-installations that were shown for the first time in an exhibition Zurich in autumn 2010. The book Videograms documents both, the video installations and their mise en scene at the museum, as well as the context in which the original material was produced in the laboratory. It also includes essays by scholars in image and cultural sciences and by scientists.

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Galerie nachst St. Stephan is one of Austria's, and indeed Europe's, most eminent and distinguished galleries for contemporary art. Located in the same place in the heart of Vienna since the 1920's it has been exploring the art of the modern era for nearly ninety years. With the exhibition 'Signs, Waves, Signals - Reconstructive and Parallel' Rosemarie Schwarzwalder, the gallery's director since 1978, presented in 1984 a program featuring basic elements that have proven relevant in numerous solo and group exhibitions up to the present. 'Rift Gap Hinge A' documents an internationally recognised exhibition staged at Galerie nachst St. Stephan in 2006/07. Curator and artist Heinrich Dunst had put together work by international artists, driving the trained relationship between media and sign, between the visible and the expressible to the extreme. The show made traceable the illuminating relation between visual art, film and literature. By transposing the display of art works into a book 'Rift Gap Hinge A' extends and consolidates at the same time the scope in the relation between art and its depiction. More than 70 photographs of art works and the exhibition are complemented by detailed descriptions of the works and an introductory essay. The artists represented in the exhibition include: John Baldessari, Konrad Bayer, Marcel Broodthaers, Rafal Bujnowski, Ernst Caramelle, Clegg & Guttmann: Michael Clegg & Martin Guttmann, Heinrich Dunst, Rainer Ganahl, Nikolaus Gansterer, Louise Lawler, Jan Mancuska, Christian Marclay, Michael S. Riedel, Ferdinand Schmatz, Peter Tscherkassky, JoA"lle Tuerlinckx & Remy Zaugg .

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Practices of experimentation lie at the heart of creative research and teaching in higher education in arts. The Department of Art & Media at Zurich University of the Arts offers a unique teaching and research environment as a laboratory of converging and diverging practices of experimentation. Its Bachelor and Master's programs are supported by two research institutes within the department, the Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR) and the Institute for Critical Theory (ith). Practices of Experimentation investigates how the different fields of fine arts, photography, media arts and theory interlace with each other, inspire and differentiate one and another. The book presents 15 positions in text, image, video and sound by theorists and artists. They enquire how practices of experimentation constitute one of the most advanced approaches to research and teaching in arts worldwide. They ask how practices of experimentation are able to unfold, take position and enquire current discourses on artistic creation, the relation between art schools and society, the specific production of knowledge in the arts and the particularities of inter- and trans-disciplinary teaching and research in the arts. Contains essays by Essays by Ute Meta Bauer, Maria Eichhorn, Knowbotic Research, Jorg Huber, Marianne Muller, Gerald Raunig, Nils Roller, Richard Wentworth. With a foreword by Giaco Schiesser and Christoph Brunner.

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Edition VFO, Verein für Originalgraphik (Association for Original Prints) was established in 1948 to pursue the goals of publishing contemporary art and making collecting affordable to broader audiences. The Zurich-based, much-recognised non-profit institution remains committed to the dissemination of contemporary art, and is now the largest of the few remaining publishers of original printed editions in Switzerland. Print Art Now marks Edition VFO’s 75th anniversary. It brings together three exhibitions in Switzerland, at the Musée Jenisch in Vevey, the Museo Civico Villa dei Cedri in Bellinzona, and the Kunsthaus Grenchen, all curated on the occasion of the jubilee. They respectively explore the topics of collecting prints today, the technical and artistic challenges of printmaking, and the emancipation of print as a medium within the traditional hierarchy of visual art. The featured artworks demonstrate how print is constantly evolving as an artistic technique and has become equal to painting, photography, sculpture, or video. The beautiful volume also offers an up-to-date survey of printmaking in Switzerland and highlights its relevance in contemporary art practice, marking Edition VFO’s 75th anniversary. It brings together three exhibitions in Switzerland, at the Musée Jenisch in Vevey, the Museo Civico Villa dei Cedri in Bellinzona, and the Kunsthaus Grenchen, all curated on the occasion of the jubilee. They respectively explore the topics of collecting prints today, the technical and artistic challenges of printmaking, and the emancipation of print as a medium within the traditional hierarchy of visual art. The featured artworks demonstrate how print is constantly evolving as an artistic technique and has become equal to painting, photography, sculpture, or video. The beautiful volume also offers an up-to-date survey of printmaking in Switzerland and highlights its relevance in contemporary art practice. Text in English, German French, and Italian.

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British-born artist Rachel Lumsden creates primarily large-format figurative paintings characterised by intensely atmospheric, pictorial spaces. Her imagery coalesces on the canvas through a virtuoso handling of paint, evoking visual narratives that come unexpectedly close and yet cannot be entirely grasped. In her book Igniting Penguins, Lumsden invites the reader on an entertaining excursion into the art world and to the core of painting itself. Along the way we are introduced to some of its powerful and quirky gatekeepers, we are baffled by art’s apparently unshakeable gender roles, and we discover what makes figurative painting the sexy form of quantum physics. Lumsden’s essay is both a personal manifesto and a survey of today’s art scene. It offers everything you ever wanted to know about painting and the art world but never dared to ask.

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A humorous tribute to Matteo Thun, one of Italy’s most distinguished designers and architects, and his work. In the summer of 2009, Swiss photographer Walter Pfeiffer made an extensive trip from Zurich to the Italian island of Capri, taking shots of some 50 of Thun’s design objects en route. Yet, rather than doing a mere documentation of these items, Pfeiffer created highly lively tableaux vivants. The artist was accompanied on his journey by Thun’s two then teenage sons, who thus form the main visual narrative of the book and appear in many pictures together with their father’s creations. A brief introduction by Matteo Thun’s wife Susanne and an index of the depicted design gems round out this extraordinary and entertaining visual travelogue.

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“We dive into Gerber’s worlds to lose ourselves and to find ourselves again in amazing places.” This is how the Swiss art historian and acclaimed novelist Paul Nizon characterised the work of his compatriot, the painter Theo Gerber (1928–1997). Gerber was a free spirit who has remained largely unknown in his native country until the present day. This is due to the artist’s own choice, having rejected the efforts of gallery owners to introduce his works to the general public. For Gerber, success did not mean fame and glory, but rather that his art showed a different possibility from that of his contemporaries. The way in which Gerber, who roamed between a variety of styles, travelled the world, and lived with the ethnic group of the Dogon in West Africa for two years during a creative crisis, upheld his artistic freedom makes it impossible to assign him to a specific direction in 20th-century art. This book, published to coincide with a retrospective exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland, is an overdue tribute to this, in the best sense of the word, incomprehensible artist and finally provides the general public with a chance to discover and recognise his oeuvre. Text in English and German.

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A decade after the Swiss National Bank had opened its neo-baroque building in Berne, the bank’s Zurich-based Governing Board moved into its own grand office building in 1922. This major work of the local firm of Otto and Werner Pfister is a prime example of neo-classicism in Switzerland and provided Zurich with an architectural landmark at the top end of its famous Bahnhofstrasse. Marking its centenary, this book celebrates the Zurich home of the Swiss Franc. It describes in detail and lavishly illustrated the architecture and building history from planning stage until today. This is supplemented by essays on bank architecture since the Middle Ages, the urban formation of Zurich and the city's development into a financial centre in the late 19th century. In his contribution, the renowned Canadian-British architect Adam Caruso compares it from today’s perspective with other central bank buildings and places it in context of the Pfister brothers’ other public commissions, many of which are occupying prominent locations in Zurich's cityscape. Richly illustrated with historical and new photographs, original plans and other historical documents, the volume pays tribute to a piece of public architecture that combines monumentality with pragmatism and republican modesty.

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Wolfgang Beltracchi is a phenomenon of the international art world. His name is inextricably entwined with one of the greatest upheavals in the global art market. Emulating numerous world-famous artists, he developed and painted new paintings, continued their narrations and biography, and concluded them with a forged signature. His wife Helene Beltracchi then smuggled them onto the art market. Many experts were deceived by Beltracchi’s stupendous skill and auctioneers cast many doubts aside in the interests of insatiable market demand, selling the paintings as authentic works by the purported artists. Reading the artistic handwriting of a painting requires an exceptional willingness and ability to be able to empathise and identify with the artist, until you “can feel what the other feels” (Wolfgang Beltracchi). Through extensive discussions with the painter and his wife, the psychoanalyst Jeannette Fischer explored this capability that is so pronounced for Beltracchi. In her new book, she places this in relation to the disappearance of Beltracchi’s own signature. As with her previous highly successful book about the performance artist Marina Abramović, Jeannette Fischer has created an exceptionally insightful portrait of a fascinating artist personality.

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Many psychiatric hospitals in Switzerland house a treasure trove of historical photographs that go back to the 19th century and until now have never been studied properly. Glass slides and negatives, loose paper prints, and photo albums allow fascinating insights into the modernisation of these establishments — and at the same time into the history of photography. The medium that was new at the time was used by psychiatrists to record diagnoses, as well as to show the public life behind institutional walls. Thanks to increasingly handy cameras, it was also possible to record the modest celebrations, and leisure and creative activities. Behind Walls introduces these testimonials of life and scientific practice in psychiatric institutions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that are accessible to the public for the first time. The essays critically study the use of photography as a medium in psychiatry from different perspectives. Text in English and German.

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In October 2021, David Chipperfield’s new extension of the Kunsthaus Zürich will open for the public. The new wing doubles the museum’s space for art display. Perhaps more importantly, it offers the opportunity to present larger parts of the museum’s permanent collection in a new light and in new groupings. The Chipperfield building is now home to the renowned Merzbacher, Hubert Looser, and Emil Bührle collections, all on permanent loan to the museum. The formidable selection of French impressionist paintings in the Emil Bührle Collection combined with Kunsthaus Zürich’s own holdings of that period constitutes the largest display of impressionist art outside France. In addition, Surrealism, art from the post-war period, Pop Art, and contemporary art now have the prominent space they deserve. This new book offers an introduction to the curatorial concept as well as concise essays on key aspects of Kunsthaus Zurich’s permanent collection. Lavishly illustrated with views of the new exhibits and individual art works, it is an attractive invitation to visit Switzerland’s largest art museum.

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The studio and residential building at Wuhrstrasse 8/10 in Zurich is a unique place: Commissioned by the Painters & Sculptors Cooperative Zurich, founded in 1948, eminent Swiss architect Ernst Gisel (1922–2021) designed this ensemble of buildings comprising 8 apartments and twelve artist studios in 1953. Thus, a utopia of self-organised working and living space became reality. Since then, 54 artists have left their mark on the artistic and cultural life of Zurich and Switzerland from their home on Wuhrstrasse 8/10. This book recounts the history of this extraordinary structure, illustrated with archival plans and documents as well as new and historic photographs. It also examines the political and social dimension of the Wuhrstrasse model and its international impact. Further essays explore how the lives and works of the resident artists are interwoven with contemporary events, and address the artist studio as both an idealised myth and as a real place of work. In inserts created especially for the book, eleven Zurich-based artists, all members of the cooperative themselves, respond to the exemplary model that is the “Atelierhaus.”

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La Gara is an 18th-century country estate in Jussy, a village near Geneva, Switzerland. The buildings have been carefully restored by Swiss architect Verena Best, who also added inspired touches to the interior design. The renowned Belgian landscape designer Erik Dhont reinterpreted and subtly redesigned the gardens and surrounding grounds, completed by a palindrome-like labyrinth designed by Swiss artist Markus Raetz. This new book tells the full story of the La Gara estate and illustrates its beauty. The essays investigate various aspects of its preservation and restoration of buildings and gardens and the contemporary interventions. They highlight features such as the historic watering system for the gardens and the fishponds, and look at the specific Genevan garden tradition and characteristics of the rural landscape around Jussy with its biodiversity. Moreover, they contextualise La Gara with the 'ferme ornée', a villa with agricultural and ornamental features following ancient Roman models. The beautiful volume is rounded out with newly commissioned photographs by renowned Swiss photographer Georg Aerni.

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Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) was a pioneer of 20th-century avant-garde. Remarkably versatile and immensely gifted, she produced an oeuvre that encompasses the entire range of the modernist movement from applied and fine art and dance to architecture, interior design, and teaching. Equlibre, created in 1931, marks the beginning of Taeuber-Arp's career as an accomplished painter. She moves away from figuration to focus on shape and colour. Circle, square, and rectangle define her future vocabulary. While in her earlier textiles she used multiple shades and hues, she now reduces her palette to primary colours alongside black and white, signalling a markedly changed sense of colour. The painting's posthumous title emphasises Taeuber-Arp's constant striving for an ideal balance of colour, shape, and indeed all the elements in her paintings. From here, she sets out to explore movement, circles, and spaces, and later gradations and lines. Equilibre, a landmark of Taeuber-Arp's oeuvre, looks ahead to her future subject matter, while at the same time referencing her earlier work. Text in English and German.

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Since it was first published in 1972, "Learning from Las Vegas" has become a classic in the theory of architecture and one of the most influential architecture texts of the twentieth century. The treatise by Robert Venturi (*1925), Denise Scott Brown (*1931), and Steven Izenour (1940 2001) enjoys a reputation as a signal work of postmodernism in architecture and urban planning. Yet none of the book s editions have ever featured high-quality color images of the field research the authors conducted to illustrate their argument. "Las Vegas Studio "is the first book ever to present these significant photographs in large color reproductions. Now available again in a new paperback edition, this unique book features 102 of these iconic images and film stills, alongside essays by Swiss scholars Stanislaus von Moos Martino Stierli that explore how the pictures contemplate the phenomenon of the modern city. Also included is a discussion by curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist with Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and Swiss artist Peter Fischli that speaks to the strong and lasting influence these images still have on contemporary art and movies.A unique opportunity to experience the full intent and import of the Learning from Las Vegas project, "Las Vegas Studio" continues to appeal to architects, architectural historians, and scholars alike. "

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Born in London in 1943, Stephen Willats is a pioneer of conceptual art and has, over the course of more than five decades, created a multi-faceted body of work. This new book, published in conjunction with Migros Museum of Contemporary Art in Zurich, focuses on two key aspects of Willats' art. Cybernetics, the control of dynamic systems, in which he has taken a keen interest, serves him as method, aesthetic vocabulary, as well as a formal model. Subcultures that promote non-conformism and self-determination constitute another focal point in his wide-ranging work. The book offers a new approach to Willats' art from multiple perspectives. A comprehensive selection of both earlier and more recent works, some of them published here for the first time, is complemented by essays. The authors investigate that particular creative sphere in between cybernetics, architecture, and subculture within which Willats questions normative, regulating power structures and aims to discover personal freedom and alternative thought patterns.

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The Swiss collects the work of Swedish photographer Christian Nilson, who has lived in Switzerland for more than ten years. During that time, he has travelled hundreds of miles throughout the country, camera in hand, capturing countless people and places through his inimitable self-taught technique, which involves using a flash to ensure every detail is perfectly visible. Nilson brings his perspective as an immigrant in Switzerland to a wide variety of subjects, which show his love of his adopted country in all its conflicted complexity - the traditional and the innovative, the spectacular and the mundane. By turns pensive and humorous, Nilson's photographic journey through Switzerland will be of interest to anyone who has called a new place home, while also introducing new audiences to one of the most exciting young voices in European photography. With sixty-seven full colour images, the book also includes an essay by Jon Bollmann.

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2010 marked the 50th anniversary of Brazil's capital Brasilia. Architects Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer designed what has become the world's most famous and widely studied urban planning project. Niemeyer's Cathedral, his building for the National Congress and the city's 707-ft television tower are icons of modern architecture. The entire city, marked by its cross-shaped layout and vast open spaces, was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987. Rene Burri, celebrated Magnum photographer, visited Brasilia's vast building sites for the first time in 1958. He returned many times over the years, documenting with his camera growth and further development of this built Utopia. Besides documenting the buildings in various stages of completion, Burri took portraits of Niemeyer and his workers and photographed Brasilia's street scenes and people and aerial views of the city's first slums. His images capture the strong sense of a new era and a vibrant atmosphere of hard work and strain; they reflect the huge dimensions of the landscape and the great scale of this project and its ambition to design and build a new capital. Rene Burri. Brasilia presents a large selection from hundreds of colour and black-and-white photographs, the majority of them published in this book for the first time. It allows the reader for the first time to look at one of the most extraordinary cities with the eyes of an exceptional photographer.

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In May of 1832 Swiss artist Karl Bodmer (1809-93) set out with Maximilian, Prince of Wied, on a twenty-eight-month expedition along the Ohio and Missouri Rivers. Along the way, Bodmer produced more than four hundred watercolours and sketches of Native American people, landscapes, animals, and plants. Engravings of many of the images were subsequently used to illustrate Travels in the Interiors of North America, Prince Maximilian's well-known historical account. Paying homage to the great painter who captured for the rest of the world so many important natural details of early America, Karl Bodmer presents all eighty-one engravings used to illustrate Maximilian's book, as well as the original watercolours, sketches, and photographs collected during the passage. Bodmer's detailed work is among the most important documents of Native American culture of the nineteenth century, and this richly illustrated volume brings to life a monumental event in both art history and the history of early America. Text in English and German.

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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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