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

In 2006, the book Historic Houses in the Engadin: Architectural Interventions by Hans-Jörg Ruch brought the name and work of this Swiss architect to international attention. His new book, with equally opulent design and again lavishly illustrated, now documents the entire range of his achievements over nearly twenty-five years. His oeuvre comprises private houses and multi-unit residential buildings, public buildings such as museums or libraries, as well as infrastructure designs. A focus of the firm's work is the rebuilding and restoration of existing and in particular of historic buildings. Close-up - Ruch & Partner Architects 1994-2016 features all of the firm's realised buildings and projects to date, including the restored historic houses in the Engadine with the careful and sensitive contemporary interventions that made his name internationally known. Each is presented with atmospheric photographs and selected plans that demonstrate the firm's approach and concepts and with a concise text. A topical essay on Ruch's architecture in context with his biography and the surrounding Swiss mountain landscape.

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Le Corbusier (1887-1965) is one the most influential architects of the 20th century. In the Scandinavian countries, his influence is arguably most pronounced in the writings and art of the Danish experimentalist Asger Jorn (1914-1973). Their collaboration on Le Corbusier's pavilion for the 1937 Paris World Exhibition sparked Jorn's lifelong fascination with the great architect and with architecture more broadly as an inherently public form of art. At the same time, Le Corbusier began revealing his work in visual art and started to move from a rational, technological approach to architecture, towards a more poetic, materialist one. Published in collaboration with the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, What Moves Us? focuses specifically on the reception of Le Corbusier in Scandinavia, with the relationship between Jorn and Le Corbusier as a thematic thread. The book first highlights the architect's change of direction and subsequently takes readers through his influence on the young artist. The book's distinguished contributors explore the relationships that emerged among their artistic theories and practices, including Jorn's later critique of Le Corbusier.Essays also explore the wider influence of Le Corbusier on Scandinavian architecture and urbanisation and consider Le Corbusier alongside the Danish architect Jorn Oberg Utzon and the Aarhus Brutalism movement.

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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 20th century. The treatise by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour enjoys a reputation as a signal work of postmodernism in architecture and urban planning. None of the book's editions have ever featured high-quality colour images the authors produced to illustrate their argument. Las Vegas Studio, originally published in hardback in 2008, was the first publication ever to present these significant photographs in large colour 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 and Hans Ulrich Obrist exploring how the pictures contemplate the phenomenon of the modern city. Also included is a discussion 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. Hilar Stadler, born 1963, read art history and is director of Museum im Bellpark in Kriens, near Lucerne, Switzerland. Martino Stierli, born 1974, has been appointed the MoMA s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design as of March 2015. He has been a senior research assistant at ETH Zurich's Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) 2011 to 2012, a Fellow of the Getty Institute in Los Angeles in 2012, and an SNSF Professor for the History of Architecture and Art at University of Zurich since 2012.

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agps architecture is a multidisciplinary design cooperative with studios in Los Angeles and Zurich. The firm was founded in 1982 by Marc Angelil and Sarah Graham in the United States and the Zurich studio followed in 1992. Bridging the domains of urban design, infrastructure, landscape, and architecture, the group approaches problem-solving as a collaborative enterprise, exploring relationships between design processes and products. From the development of urban strategies to the identification of construction techniques, the work is based on conceptual strategies translated into physical form. 'Another Take' is the first comprehensive monograph on agps architecture's work and ideas. It presents selected projects with photographs from the vantage point of users, showing projects in their daily context, but also with floor plans, sections and elevations. A series of essays, conceived as stories, unravel hidden aspects of the work: a sort of psychoanalytical uncovering of latent traits that are as much part of the buildings as their physical manifestation.

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Glaciers in the Alps and on Greenland have been melting away slowly for decades. Global warming has increased the speed of their retreat drastically in recent years. Swiss geophysicist Alfred de Quervain (1879-1927) carried out the first survey of the Clariden glacier in the Swiss canton of Glarus and initiated and led important scientific expeditions on Greenland in 1909 and 1912. Swiss artist Martin Stützle and photographer Fridolin Walcher also link Glarus with Greenland. Both have made the Swiss glaciers the subject of their work and, in May 2018, joined a Swiss research campaign investigating the current state of the glaciers on the world's largest island. The photographs and prints they produce reflect an intense awareness of scientific facts, yet they strike the viewer emotionally and aesthetically. This book blends the essence of glaciological and geophysical research with contemporary art and picks up on Alfred de Quervain's legacy. Prints and photographs are featured alongside three easy-to-read essays offering a concise survey of the findings of the 2018 expedition. A fourth essay comments on Stützle's and Walcher's works and explores current trends in climate art. Text English, German and Kalaallisut (Greenlandic).

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In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Zurich's youth was rebellious. An entire generation of students was in search for the 'new'. In 1981, photographic artist Simone Kappeler left her native Switzerland, setting off on a road trip across America. She took with her a Hasselblad, a 35 mm camera, as well as a Polaroid. Over the course of the journey, she would add a multitude of cheap cameras to this collection that enabled snapshot-like images - taken unselfconsciously whenever a motif sprang at her. The images reflect a direct and unrestrained manner, they tell of immediate sensual experience and the longing for freedom and independence. Thirty-five years later, Kappeler has revisited the vast collection that resulted from her undertaking. The selection of some 230 images and their composition reveal a consistent artistic perspective and a signature style. And even today, her 1981 view of America has lost none of its magic. Text in English and German.

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Over centuries, the transnational Alpine region Tyrol - South Tyrol - Trentino (Alto Adige) has developed along ancient trade routes between Germany and Austria on one side of the Alps and northern Italy on the other. Similar to the region's modern and contemporary architecture, its product design is in many cases rooted in a rich local tradition of craftsmanship. Yet since the 1920s, this multi-lingual region has also proven its remarkable openness to European modernism's most progressive movements and become an unexpected laboratory for technical and formal exploration in the middle of the continent. Design from the Alps, published to coincide with an exhibition at museum Kunst Meran in autumn 2019, tells the story of a century of product design from Tyrol - South Tyrol - Trentino, highlighting the vast variety of discoveries and innovations that have emerged there. Featured artists include, among others, Fortunato Depero (1892-1960), whose experiments were inspired by the Secondo Futurismo, Gino Pollini (1903-91), a pioneer of the interwar period, as well as the celebrated architects and designers Lois Welzenbacher (1889-1955), Clemens Holzmeister (1886-1983), and Ettore Sottsas (1917-2007). Lavishly illustrated, the book follows the many protagonists of this at the same time heterogenous and collectively strong scene and offers an insightful tour d'horizon of the manifaceted design culture of western Austria and northern Italy. Text in English, German and Italian.

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Since the 1970s, Swiss artist Manon has been confronting observers with their own vision. Her performances raise question about the boundary between staging and exhibitionism. Always challenging and at times highly subversive, her performances question power structures and put gender identities to discussion. Following-up on the previous volume Manon - A Person, published in 2008, this new volume introduces her work of the past decade to a wider audience. At the core is Hotel Dolores, a series of installations and performances staged at closed-down hotels in the Swiss spa town of Baden between 2008 and 2011. Photographs of venues and Manon's performances are completed by her conceptual sketches and other documents. Concise essays on aspects of Manon's art and vision round out this book. Text in English, French and German.

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Flowers are a perennially popular motif throughout art history. And for good reason: lush with texture and colour, a living bouquet of blooms can be made to communicate much through the masterly brushstrokes of Vincent Van Gogh or Georgia O'Keeffe, in the hands of a skilled ikebana artist, or through the lens of contemporary photography. For more than two decades, Swiss photographer Anna Halm Schudel has focused her eye on flowers, zooming in on calyxes, pistils, and leaf veins to create exuberant feasts of colours. While celebrating the wide variety of shapes and sizes that nature and human cultivation have brought us, Schudel is no less fascinated by the process of decay. As the flowers fade, wilt, and wither, she transforms them under water into images of strange, compelling beauty, to combine their delicate beauty with a stirring memento mori. Eighty strikingly beautiful colour plates are complemented by two essays that examine Schudel's symbolism and put her work in context with the history of the floral still life. As exquisite as the subject itself, this beautifully designed large book is sure to inspire appreciation for this rising Swiss artist. Text in English and German.

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For some forty years, Susi and Ueli Berger's work has been guided by the credo that 'only a new idea justifies a new piece of furniture'. Contrasts between product design and object art, and suitability for everyday use characterise their designs. A playful provocativeness and the combination of rationality and sensuality are additional hallmarks of the Bergers. In 2010, they were awarded Switzerland's most prestigious national design prize, the Grand Prix Design for their joint lifetime achievements at the interface of art, architecture, and design. Susi Berger-Wyss, born 1938 in Lucerne, trained as a graphic designer and worked with an advertising agency in Berne before she met and married Ueli Berger in 1962. Apart from their close collaboration in furniture and interior design, Susi continued to work as a freelance graphic designer and also collaborated with architects, developing colour and material concepts for interiors. Ueli Berger, born 1937 in Berne, trained as a painter and decorator and also attended classes at the city's school of art and design. 1959-61, he completed his artistic education during extended stays in Paris and Copenhagen and worked with renowned Swiss interior designer Hans Eichenberger. Until his passing in 2008, Ueli worked as an artist - creating a much recognised oeuvre in painting, drawing, and sculpture - and designer, and also held a number of teaching appointments at universities and art schools in Switzerland. Featuring a wealth of previously unpublished original drawings, plans, photographs, and promotion materials, as well as a catalogue raisonné of Susi and Ueli Berger's collaborative work and an illustrated biography, this groundbreaking book offers the first-ever survey of their life and oeuvre. It is published in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition at Zurich's Museum für Gestaltung in summer 2018. Text in English and German.

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Swiss photographer Tom Haller has gained wide recognition for his work in portraiture and reportage. Less well known, but equally arresting, are the landscapes Haller has produced during his travels throughout the United States over the course of nearly three decades. His photographs of America - of prairies, mountains, roads and the buildings lining them, motels, stadiums, shops, and abandoned cars - display a traveller's detached, inquisitive, perspective, with Haller directing his gaze at subjects while simultaneously depicting both the promise of these landscapes and the limits to the dreams they inspire. Tom Haller - Nuggets compiles a selection of his American landscapes that reflect the state of the country and the feelings and experiences of its people. Taking Haller's images as his starting point, Christian Seiler draws on his own extensive travels throughout the United States to explore the artist's intentions and the mood of the country as a whole. Text in English and German.

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uilt in 1928 by renowned Swiss engineer Walter Versell (1891-1989), the modern bridge crossing the Rhine at Tavanasa, Switzerland, was eventually no longer strong enough to serve today's heavy traffic, and it was replaced by a new viaduct nearby. With strong local support for the initiative, Versell's original elegant structure was preserved and restored and now serves as a pedestrian bridge. Nossa Punt tells the story of this masterpiece of Swiss civil engineering set in the context of the entire Tavanasa 'bridgescape'. With Contributions from Ursula Baus, Simon Berger, Arno Camenisch, Sep Cathomas, Rita Cathomas Bearth, Jürg Conzett, Wilfried Dechau, Peter Egloff, and Robert Kruker, the book documents this fascinating restoration and offers a portrait of the people involved in saving this hidden monument. It is richly illustrated with photographs by Wilfried Dechau. Text in English, German, Rhaeto-Romanic.

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Swiss artist Barbara Davi, born 1971, primarily works with the medias of installation and photo-collage. Following her artistic education at Zurich's School of Art and Design (today Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK) and Lucerne School of Art, Davi has developed her original style, working in three-dimensional space as well as on two-dimensional surfaces, using architectural and geometric shapes and elements. Using wooden slats or a table, lines or a circular shape, light beams or a shadow, Davi creates quasi-drawings in space and photo-collages of a magical, almost three-dimensional depth. Her motifs emerge from a sequence of deliberations, from her 'train of thought'. This first monograph on Barbara Davi features her striking work from the past ten years. Around 100 plates in colour and black and white are complemented by essays on Davi's way of working in her preferred media.

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The work of Austrian-born, Swiss-based artist Othmar Eder is marked by a multitude of materials, media, and formats. However, the passage of time and his personal experiences travelling from place to place are key inspirations behind his creative process. Across his paintings and drawings, motifs related to these themes recur with minor or major variations. Eder also works frequently in photography and video, where his focus is on subtle shifts in structure and texture. Featuring 250 illustrations, Othmar Eder - Finding Images provides a stunning overview of Eder's work, while a preface by Zsuzsanna Gahse and an essay by art historian and curator Katja Baumhoff offer fascinating insights into their conception and creation. The book will bring the work of this important contemporary artist to a wider audience. Text in English and German.

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At the 2014 International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator of the Swiss pavilion, realised a display and a series of events referring to Lucius Burckhardt (1925-2003), an eminent Swiss sociologist and urbanist. In the 1980s, Burckhardt had proposed the concept of a science of Strollology, based on his view that only by strolling we truly perceive our environment. Burckhardt, a pioneer of modern urbanism, also re-defined architecture as "orbiting around man, space, and achievement". Twelve Swiss artists were commissioned to explore the exhibit in Venice and to develop the art project Invent the Future with Elements of the Past in Zurich, for which Burckhardt once again proved inspirational. They strolled searching for the narrative of urban design, thus offering an artistic interpretation of Burckhardt's ideas and theories. This new book documents the project, featuring original contributions, inserts, texts, images, and interviews by the participating artists.

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Built in 1913 for a local politician and engineer and beautifully situated on the shore of Lake Zurich, this handsome villa today is home to the Jacobs Foundation and the Johann Jacobs Museum. It was acquired in the 1980s by the Jacobs family, who had been in the coffee, tea, and cocoa trade in Bremen since 1895 but eventually sold the business to an international conglomerate in the 1990s. The Johann Jacobs Museum focuses on the history and present of global trade routes. Its exhibitions and educational program revolves around cultural hybrids that develop sometimes intentionally, sometimes incidentally along the main routes and byways of trade. This new book tells the story of the Jacobs House and offers an introduction to the goals of the Jacobs Foundation and the museum. It also documents the building's extensive reconstruction by Basel-based architects Miller & Maranta, who have made major changes to its structure with equal measures of radicalism and sensitivity while entirely preserving its character and style.

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Colour and light as sensory stimulus and the phenomenon of light encountering surfaces are core elements of the work of artists Silvia Gertsch, born in Switzerland in 1963, and the German Xerxes Ach, born in 1957. Gertsch works on reverse-glass, using snapshots of young people in summer, sunbathing, strolling down the street, or children absorbed in play. Ach has turned to micro-phenomena in which light encounters various materials, is refracted in various ways, and generates abstract visual compositions. In spite of their different stylistic languages - realism on the one side, abstract colour field painting on the other - occupying antagonistic positions in contemporary painting, the two artists take a similar approach, starting from photos they take themselves and digitally edit, as well as found ones recording fleeting visual stimuli. Coinciding with a dual exhibition of Silvia Gertsch and Xerxes Ach at the Museum of Fine Arts Bern, this new book features their work from two decades. Richly illustrated, it puts their differing pictorial languages in a dance-like dialogue, revealing each artist's relation to current artistic discourses.

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George Steinmann, artist, musician and researcher, is recognised as an eminent intermediary between art and the sciences in Switzerland. For many years he has been investigating the relation between ecology and aesthetics. Many of Steinmann's works are created in a lengthy process and often involve other artists and scientists working on trans-disciplinary projects. Call and Response presents George Steinmann's thinking and working methods and analyses the development of his oeuvre and his collaboration with other disciplines. The second part of the book features selected works from the past thirty years and discusses them in the context of today's artistic discourse.

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The Greek arte povera artist Nakis Panayotidis was born in 1947 in Athens and was educated in architecture in Turin and in visual arts in Rome. Since 1974 he has been living and working both in Bern and Greek island of Serifos. In the tradition of arte povera, Panayotidis employs a great diversity of materials in his art, such as stone, straw, lead, iron, copper and lamps etc. His art combines light and life and is never static. It always revolves around opposites that have found a moment of equilibrium. In his work, Panayotidis aims to emphasise the intrinsically permanent in momentary incidental images. This new book is published to coincide with a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Fine Art Bern. It features work by the artist in painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and photography. Essays are contributed by curators Matthias Frehner and Regula Berger, Italian scholar, curator and art critic Bruno Cora, and also by personal friends of Panayotidis and collectors of his work.

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Over the past thirty years, severe storms have swept over the entire Alpine region in short succession. The enormous masses of water they bring along, combined with mankind interfering with nature, increase the likelihood of more frequent natural disasters. The artist duo wiedemann/mettler took up the story of Noah's ark. As the Book of Genesis tells us, the great deluge came to obliterate humanity's moral corruption. However, God bestowed mercy on Noah and asked him to build an ark that would save humankind and wildlife alike. wiedemann/mettler's interpretation of this symbolic narrative comes under the title "better safe than sorry" and presents the topic of safety in all its ambivalence. This new book documents the installation "better safe than sorry" at House of Art Uri in summer 2014 and other recent work by wiedemann/mettler.

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This new book documents a specific project within Zurich University of Art, their Masters course, that is based on experimental and project-orientated thinking as well as trans-disciplinary, individual and collaborative work. Work created in this project was featured in a public exhibition throughout the summer, 2013. It Is All in the Detail challenges the reader to get up-close-and-personal with art, to get involved. Challenging perceptions, it focuses its attention from the general to the detailed, from the conception of projects to their realisation. It is insightful and thought-provoking, contemplative of the art itself, the creative process and its meaning.

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In 1962, Ernst Scheidegger published his first book using his own name as an imprint. This book was the German edition of Jean Genet's essay on Alberto Giacometti. The great artist and close personal friend of Ernst Scheidegger has been subject of a number of books published by Verlag Ernst Scheidegger and Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess since. The most successful of them has been "Traces of a Friendship - Alberto Giacometti", first published in 1990 and reprinted several times. To mark the 50th anniversary of Verlag Ernst Scheidegger / Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess present a new, completely revised and expanded edition of this classic. It includes around 40 previously unpublished colour images which have recently been discovered in Ernst Scheidegger's archive. They add an intimate new chapter to this legendary book. In addition to the more accurate dating of some photographs' the essays and captions have been revised and expanded also. Text in English and German.

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Hans Danuser is among the foremost contemporary Swiss photographic artists. He has gained particular recognition for his art projects in collaboration with architects and for his architectural photography. His work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions and is represented in public collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Kunsthaus Zurich and the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. His photographs of buildings by the celebrated Swiss architect Peter Zumthor ignited a lively debate on buildings, images and history when they were first shown twenty years ago and have since made their way around the world in magazines and books.They were the result of a carte blanche Zumthor had offered to Danuser: an artist's radically subjective look at the work of another artist representing a different discipline. "Seeing Zumthor - Images by Hans Danuser" presents a selection of Danuser's Zumthor-pictures. An accompanying essay investigates the effect of Danuser's work on the photographic depiction of architecture, and in a discussion Hans Danuser explains the idea and concept behind his images of Zumthor's buildings.

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The long-term Photographic Observation Schlieren is a much-recognised unique research project that documents urban development in Switzerland. Over a period of 15 years, a photographic record of building activity and urbanisation processes was conducted to demonstrate how these are altering the character of a typical Swiss suburban community. The chosen example was the town of Schlieren, bordering the city of Zurich to the west, whose population grew from 13,000 to 20,000 residents during the observation period of 2005–20. At 63 locations throughout Schlieren, pictures were taken under identical conditions every two years that show the changes in the spatial interplay of buildings, streets, and green spaces. Simultaneously, series of topical detailed photographs were produced that focus on individual objects and tell of the appropriation, design, and aesthetics of habitats, such as store fronts, building entrances, playgrounds, parking entrances, etc. This two-volume set brings together the results of this spectacular research. The Archive volume features the entire body of the eight images taken at each of the 63 sites to visualise the deep changes Schlieren has undergone during these 15 years. The Essays volume combines the topical image series with essays that offer in-depth examination of the study’s subject, detailed analyses and interpretations, and interviews by expert authors from various disciplines.

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French sculptor Aristide Maillol (1861–1944) is sometimes referred to as the “Cézanne of sculpture” as he, like Paul Cézanne in painting, paved the way for abstraction. Though Maillol began as a painter, he produced an impressive collection of sculptures, many featuring women, over the course of his career. This book, published in conjunction with a comprehensive Maillol exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich, examines how the male gaze operates in Maillol’s art and the changing perceptions of this gaze from the 19th century to today. A photo essay by Franca Candrian contrasts Maillol’s Vénus au collier with works by modern and contemporary women artists from the Kunsthaus Zürich’s collection. An essay by feminist art historian and curator Catherine McCormack explores the presence of art depicting female nudes – in contemporary museums. Supplemented by an introduction by Philippe Büttner, curator of Kunsthaus Zürich’s permanent collection, the book thus offers a fresh and unique view of Maillol and his art. Text in English and German.

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The complex, enigmatic work of Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) has lost nothing of its fascination to the present day. Much has been written about her career and her art. Yet very little is known about the real person Meret Oppenheim, who always remained secretive about herself and banned publication of any personal documents until 20 years after her death. In 1958, Oppenheim put together an album that she titled Von der Kindheit bis 1943 (From Childhood to 1943). It has a dual identity of a diary and a work of art in itself. It assembles photos, objects, notes and brief texts, as well as ideas and concepts for art works, and offers very personal insights into Oppenheim’s private life and thought. This book features the entire album in true-size colour reproductions and, for the first time ever, with the full text translated into English. This is supplemented with a previously unpublished autobiographical text by Oppenheim, which she wrote in 1957-58 on the request of the French scholar Yves Poupard-Lieussou for his never completed project of a bio-bibliographical history of Dada and Surrealism. An introduction by the editors Lisa Wenger and Martina Corgnati rounds out this beautiful book that offers entirely new perspectives on one of the most distinguished woman artists. Text in English and German.

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Evan Ifekoya is an artist and energy worker who, through sound, text, video, and performance, and places demands on existing systems and institutions of power in order to re-centre and prioritise the experiences and voices of those previously marginalised. Their practice considers art as a site where resources can be both redistributed and renegotiated, whilst challenging the implicit rules and hierarchies of public and social spaces. In an exhibition at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in spring 2022, Ifekoya explores a cosmology of healing through sound, stillness, and the creation of intentional space — a site for reflection and contemplation as part of a large installation inside the museum. Through investigations with sonic and visual artists as well as instrument-makers, the show focuses on self-care and healing. It also showcases Ifekoya’s ongoing investigation into the somatic experience of listening, the healing potential of sound, and the spiritual dimension of sexuality. This book, published in conjunction with the exhibition, features contributions from artists, curators and writers, and by Ifekoya themselves. In an interview with the critic and researcher Kojo Abudu, the artist reflects on their journey to producing sound-led work, and their recent exploration of drumming and object making. Text in English and German.

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Since 2007, Switzerland’s Federal Office of Culture has honoured the work of renowned designers who exemplify the quality and relevance of Swiss design practice both nationally and internationally. Simply put, the yearly awarded Swiss Grand Prix of Design reflects the best that Switzerland has to offer in this field. The roll call of winners illustrates the country’s multifaceted spectrum of design production. In their many and varied ways, they have infused the cultural landscape with fresh ideas and continue to inspire new generations of designers, influencing current design as well as Swiss design history. The 2021 laureates of the Swiss Grand Prix of Design are the graphic designer Julia Born, photographer and art director Peter Knapp, and researcher and lecturer Sarah Owens. This book introduces them through texts, a conversation, a short biography and images from their archives. Text in English, French, German and Italian

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Swiss artist Silvie Defraoui realised a significant part of her work beginning in 1975 together with her husband Chérif (1932–1994). Silvie and Chérif Defraoui compiled their photo and video works, installations, sculptures, and performances under the title Archives du Futur. They taught together at Geneva’s École supérieure des Beaux- Arts (today HEAD–Genève), where they founded the legendary studio Média Mixte and counted a number of renowned artists among their students. The Archives du Futur, to which Silvie Defraoui has continued adding works since Chérif’s premature death, has been made available as a digital catalogue raisonné to browse online. This book accompanies, supplements, and expands on the digital documentation. It gathers 14 commentaries on individual works of the two artists by distinguished art theorists and curators, originally published from 1984 onwards, in various art journals and exhibition catalogues or newly written for this book. They reflect on the artists’ joint oeuvre as well as on work created independently by Silvie Defraoui. Interviews with her and selected lecture texts from the couple’s shared teaching activities shed light on their artistic stance and thematic focuses. The volume invites an exploration of an artistic body of work that is highly topical through its merging of dualities - memory and the present, Orient and Occident, man and woman, tradition and invention. Text in English, French and German.

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This book offers the first-ever survey of Swiss artist Nicolas Party’s entire body of work. Born in 1980 in Lausanne, Party now lives and works in New York and has established himself as one of the most important figures of international contemporary art. Nicolas Party—Rovine (Italian for ruins) features pastels and sculptures that Party has created since 2013. The book focuses on the core genres of painting: still life, landscape, and portrait. Party’s works stand out in these genres due to his use of wild, anti-naturalistic colours, as well as through his extremely precise rendering of the subjects. The artist explains his fascination for each of these genres in accompanying texts. The book also shows a large-format wall painting and a sculpture created especially for Party’s major solo exhibition at MASI Lugano in the summer 2021. Contributions by the art critic and curator Michele Robecchi and by MASI Lugano’s director Tobia Bezzola supplement this beautiful volume. Text in English, German and Italian.

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Photographer and artist Andrea Garbald (1877–1958) dedicated an important part of his oeuvre to the women of his native Val Bregaglia, in the Swiss canton of Grisons. As the first and, for a long time, the only photographer in the valley, he ran his own photo studio in addition to an optician’s store in the village of Castasegna. Yet instead of making his artistic work public, Garbald kept his it in his attic. His estate was only discovered in the mid-1980s and displayed in public for the first time in 2014 in a major exhibition. Andrea Garbald’s portraits collected in this volume show women of different ages and social classes and go far beyond the stiff official portraits that were common at the time. The sitters’ posture, clothes, faces, and their eyes speak volumes: the photographs demonstrate a special intimacy and empathy towards the people portrayed. At the same time, they reveal the development of the medium and its visual language. This new book provides an in-depth look at Garbald’s unusual oeuvre and offers an insight into the subtle creativity of this local pioneer. Text in Italian and German.

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Luigi Pericle (1916–2001) was a rare talent—a self-taught illustrator and painter, a man of letters, mystic, theosophist, and intellectual whose work and legacy eludes any categorization. Under his proper name Pericle Luigi Giovanetti he had great success as an illustrator and cartoonist in the 1950s. His cartoons were published worldwide in daily newspapers, such as the Washington Post or Herald Tribune, as well as in satirical magazines like Punch. His comic strip Max the Marmot, published in newspapers and books, was hugely popular across Europe, the United States, and Japan. In 1958, he turned to explore abstract expression through painting and ink drawing. He quickly gained international recognition as an artist and his paintings were exhibited in gallery and museum shows in Britain and Switzerland during the 1960s. Yet recognition was not what he was looking for, and he disappeared voluntarily from the art world to lead an increasingly secluded life dedicated entirely to his art and writing. His home Casa San Tomaso on the legendary Monte Verità in Ascona, in southern Switzerland, offered ideal surroundings for an artist so strongly drawn to spirituality. Luigi Pericle. Ad Astra, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the MASI Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, offers a fresh look at how the spiritual environment and tradition of Monte Verità influenced Pericle as an artist and how Asian calligraphy and Zen Buddhism were influential to his drawing practice. Moreover, the book investigates Pericle’s understanding of abstraction in art and his own syncretism of modern mysticism. Text in English, German and Italian.

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The use of pictures to communicate a story has a long tradition in Japanese culture that dates back more than a thousand years. Such narrative illustrations draw on Buddhist texts, classic literature, poetry, and theatrical scenes to create rich visual imagery realised in a wide range of media and format. Quotations from and allusions to heroic epics and romances were disseminated through exquisite paintings, woodblock prints, and in pieces of applied arts such as lacquer ware or ceramics, thus becoming anchored in the collective consciousness. As story-telling art found expression in a variety of materialities, it became an integral part of daily life. A fascinating narrative space evolved that combined artistic excellence and aesthetic pleasure. Love, Fight, Feast features some one hundred paintings, woodblock prints, illustrated woodblock-printed books, as well as lacquer and metal objects, porcelain, and textiles from the 13th to the 20th century, alongside scholarly essays on a range of aspects of Japanese narrative art. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the renowned Museum Rietberg in Zurich, the book offers a unique survey of the multifaceted, colourful, and imaginative world of Japanese narrative art across eight centuries.

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When American Readers at Home was published in early 2018, it was met with widespread praise. The German weekly Die Zeit called it “a fascinating contemporary document of contradictions.” The manager of a major London art bookshop tweeted on April 10, 2018 that he had “checked ALL the books at London Book Fair today to find the best one and this is it: American Readers at Home […] It’s incredible!” The book soon sold out, not least because it won gold in the 2019 German Design Award and was also among the winners of the 2018 Swiss and German national book design competitions. Swiss graphic designer and photographer Ludovic Balland has now put together a new selection of the compelling material amassed on his road trip across the United States during the 2016 presidential campaign. American Readers at Home - New Cut brings together colour photographs of cityscapes and black-and-white portraits of American citizens with interviews about their use of news media, alongside facsimiles of newspapers and collages with statements about the current state of the country. Four years have passed, yet none of these stories have lost their power or urgency! French journalist Julien Gester, who writes for the French daily Libération, and Swiss curator Hilar Stadler have contributed new forewords.

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Over the course of four decades, Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla have put together a collection of photographs that is widely recognised as among the World's most important private ones. Spanning the entire history of the medium, it lacks hardly any of the names that forged this history. It comprises some of the most famous masterpieces by artists such as Eugène Atget, Robert Adams, Walker Evans, or Robert Mapplethorpe as well as works by contemporary photographers such as Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, or Thomas Struth. The Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne is one of the world's leading museums entirely dedicated to photography. A highlight in the museum's 2018 exhibition program is the show The Beauty of the Lines, featuring some 120 works from the Gilman Gonzales- Falla collection. The coinciding book presents the selected images in visual confrontations rather than just chronologically, offering a key to their physical quality and inviting the reader to question his or her own individual experience of sensitive relationship to the photographic image. Published alongside the images are an essay exploring the range and significance of the collection and a conversation with Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla.

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As a boy, photographer and filmmaker Jurg Hassler passed the studio of sculptor Hans Josephsohn every day on his way to school. Watching the artist working captivated him, and once he had finished school in the late 1950s, Hassler began working as Josephsohn's assistant and apprentice, eventually becoming a sculptor himself. After studying photography and taking up filmmaking as well, he occupied himself with Josephsohn's sculptural work also with the camera, resulting in countless images and the film portrait Josephsohn: Stein des Anstosses (Josephsohn: Bone of Contention), which was released in 1977. This new book features a selection of photographs by Jurg Hassler, who predominantly works in black-and-white. Many of them have single sculptures by Hans Josephsohn as a motif, highlighting the artist's strong archaic expressiveness. Nina Keel's essay takes a closer look at the context of Hassler's photographic engagement with the art of his teacher. The Kesselhaus Josephsohn in St. Gallen, Switzerland, is an exhibition space dedicated to the work of Hans Josephsohn.

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In the 1980s, Bilbao, metropolis of the Basque Country in Spain, was considered the country's most polluted city and its mining and iron industries were in decline. In 1993, seven years after Spain joined the European Union, a radical transformation was initiated. Bilbao moved away from manufacturing to the service industries and, a key element of the process, towards contemporary culture. Celebrated architects such as Santiago Calatrava, Norman Foster, and Frank O. Gehry were commissioned with the design of public buildings, meant to become icons of the reinvented Bilbao. And it worked: Gehry's Guggenheim Museum has indeed become the modern city's chief attraction and one of Europe's most-visited museums. Bilbao has made the most of the chances its deep crisis offered and today is a flourishing cultural centre in Spain. Yet the industrial past is apparent and adds strongly to the particular charm of the place. Swiss photographer Roger Wehrli has documented Bilbao's transformation between 1988 and 2014. His black-and-white images tell the compelling story of decline and reinvention in a city that has also become a model for other former factory towns across Europe.

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Hannah Höch (1889–1978) moved between differing worlds: as an editorial assistant with a major Berlin-based magazine publisher, and as the only woman who could hold her own in the German capital’s vibrant Dada scene of the 1920s. Höch broke with the traditions of representation and vision. Her works dissected a world marked by the catastrophe of the Great War and an intense consumer culture, and reassembled it in revolutionary, poetic, and often ironic ways. Höch kept to her artistic means and her poetic-radical imagination, shimmering between social observation and dream world, even in the post-WWII period. Scissors and glue were the weapons of her art of montage, of which she was a co-inventor. Cutting and montage also shaped film, still a new medium in the 1920s, which strongly influenced Höch’s art: she understood her assembled pictures as static films. This richly illustrated and expertly annotated book explores comprehensively for the first time Höch’s fascination with film and the visual culture of the modern industrial age. It demonstrates how montage evolved in a field of tension between artistic experimentation, commercial exploitation, and political appropriation. A text-collage on the history of montage, in which major protagonists of Modernism and Avant-garde such as Sergej Eisenstein, Raoul Hausmann, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Ruttman, Kurt Schwitters, Theo van Doesburg, and Dsiga Wertow, have their say, rounds out the volume.

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They were reviled, ridiculed, and ignored. Today, the Zurich Concretists along with Dada are considered the most important art movement originating from Switzerland. Circle! Square! Progress! tells the story of the city's avant-garde movement, which is rooted in the Bauhaus and renewed the formal language of art, shaped design and architecture, and also positioned itself politically. It traces its relations to the heroes of ConstructivistConcrete art, such as Johannes Itten, Piet Mondrian, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Theo van Doesburg, and Georges Vantongerloo, and looks at the influences that came from graphic art and advertising, jazz music and dance, colour theory, and mathematics.Max Bill, Camille Graeser, Verena Loewensberg, and Richard Paul Lohse a group incidentally thrown together rather than true conspirators formed the centre of gravity of a milieu that wrestled with critics, institutions, and authorities. Lavishly illustrated, the book explores Z

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Susanne Bartsch has been living in New York since 1981, where she has created a dazzling Gesamtkunstwerk through the creation of her iconic looks and legendary parties. As an impresario, artist-agent, and big-hearted, open-minded hostess, she moves virtuosically at the intersection of fashion, make-up, activism, art, music, and performance. In a career as interior designer, researcher, author, and teacher that has spanned more than five decades, Verena Huber has engaged profoundly with the issues of living and staying. To this day, she continues encouraging people to question spaces and objects and to put them in new contexts. Uncompromising in her approach and always looking beyond national borders, she has been hugely influential in contemporary Swiss interior design. Since the early 1980s, artist Beat Streuli has used photography and video to create works of strong visual force. Although cityscapes form the backdrop of his images, it is always people rather than architectural or structural elements that are in his focus. Streuli’s images have made him one of the world’s foremost exponents of street portraiture. Switzerland’s Federal Office of Culture has awarded the 2022 Swiss Grand Award for Design to Susanne Bartsch, Verena Huber, and Beat Streuli. This book introduces each of them through a concise text and interview as well as a brief biography, illustrated with images from their archives. Text in English, French, German and Italian.

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The art of HR Giger (1940–2014), Swiss-born creator of the legendary monster in Ridley Scott's movie Alien, is currently experiencing a renaissance and is featured in exhibitions as well as in magazines around the globe. This lavish large-format volume offers never-before-seen insights into Giger's private house and garden, both of which are populated by biomechanical sculptures, airbrush paintings, Alien furniture, objects, prints, and self-portraits. French photographer Camille Vivier—best known for her work for Stella McCartney and Cartier—enjoyed exclusive access to the artist’s Zurich home and studio for this book, where she worked on her own as well as with models in a series of photo sessions. Vivier’s around 200 photographs form an atmospheric tribute to the arguably most distinguished representative of Fantastic Realism. In addition to images of Giger’s studio and his life-size sculptures, Vivier has also documented some hundred objects and artworks, as well as his famous Alien-style garden railroad. An essay by French publicist Farbrice Paineu places HR Giger’s art in the wider context of pop culture and the genre of horror movies. Text in English and German.

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In the 1920s, German-Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879–1940) began his long-lasting engagement with polyphonic art—multi-voiced way of painting analogous to music. A relentless experimenter, Klee began these studies while teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau, developed them further during his tenure at the art academy in Düsseldorf, and brought them to conclusion after his return to Switzerland in 1933. In this book, distinguished art historian Oskar Bätschmann explores Klee’s seminal painting Ad Parnassum (1932). Painted shortly after the artist’s departure from the Bauhaus, it symbolises a new era, also one of Klee’s own self-discovery. Bätschmann documents how the artist strove for a connection of music and painting in his colour hues and in the rhythmic movement of coloured dots. Richly illustrated, this book places Klee’s polyphonic understanding of art in an art-historical context by using this key work and offers insight into the synesthetic thinking that emerged in the art world during that time. Text in English and German.

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Deserted Boat Drifting Towards the Moon brings artist Uwe Wittwer’s watercolours and writer and poet Jürg Halter’s lyric together in a multi-layered dialogue. Inspired by Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi’s legendary movie Ugetsu Monogatari (Rain Moon Tales, 1953), they intend to trigger a new, imaginary film in the mind of the viewer-reader. It is not a self-contained story they offer. Rather, artist and poet have created a subtle play with hints, fragments, comments, and further narratives. Some of Wittwer's images are illustrative, others refuse a direct reading. Likewise, Halter's short poems in some cases are unambiguous and simple, some are equivocal and elude immediate access. In a poetic-painterly manner, the book explores questions such as “what is one's own in the foreign?”, “when does humanity turn into inhumanity?”, or “Is comfort to be found in art?” Text in English and German.

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Preserving collections of analogue video art is no easy task. Not only must collection caretakers ensure that their magnetic tapes are appropriately catalogued and stored, they must also properly inspect the content of the analogue videotapes in order to make an informed assessment of their condition. This is the only way to prevent unintended image errors - caused by a damaged videotape or video player, or by simple operator error - from being irreversibly merged with the artist's original image content during the digitisation process and thereby permanently compromising the artwork. This publication aims to provide caretakers of our audiovisual artistic and cultural heritage with a general guide to identifying, viewing, cataloguing and assessing the condition of analogue videotapes. The symptoms and causes of 28 common image errors are described in detail, and further illustrated by video sequences on an accompanying DVD. A technical chapter explains the basic principles of video technology, while an art history chapter discusses the deliberate use of image errors as creative tools in analogue video art.

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Christian Waldvogel's work in conceptual and visual art is about the earth within the solar system and mankind within its world and new imaginations. For an exhibition at Helmhaus Zurich Waldvogel has created a three-part installation using candles, cyanobacteria and nutrient fluid. In part one, melting candles by random movement form globular "planets" over the duration of the show. Through a 1,615- square-foot pool of nutrient fluid as habitat for cyanobacteria, earliest forms of life on planet earth are represented. In the third part, Waldvogel places his planets within a self-conceived solar system. This story of genesis and the beginning of life on earth, following an equally random order, has been transformed into the book Christian Waldvogel. Unknown: The Orders of Randomness and amended with images and text. Waldvogel discusses this universal narrative in conversation with experts - a cosmologist and astrophysicist, a cell-biologist and gravitational researcher, a micro-biologist and an exo-biologist working in planetary research, - revealing an unusual perspective of how our planet may have come to existence. The essays document what art can tell science and how both disciplines contribute to create our view of the world and the universe. Helmhaus Zurich is the city's municipial museum of contemporary art. Christian Waldvogel, born 1971, graduated in architecture at ETH Zurich and also studied computer music. He lives and works as a conceptual and visual artist and programmer in Zurich.

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The name of Anne Hoffmann is instinctively related by many artists, architects, museum people, and especially by book- lovers, to the range of media the Danish-born Swiss book and graphic designer has created over the course of three decades: posters, flyers, cards, CD booklets, and - above all - countless books. Hoffmann came to Basel in the 1980s to study with Armin Hofmann, one of Switzerland's preeminent graphic designers and teachers of his art, at the city's School of Design. In Basel she also established her own studio in 1986, which she moved to Zurich in 2007, and soon began working closely with Swiss and international artists such as Silvia Bächli, Richard Hamilton, or Karim Noureldin. In 'Mostly Books', naturally designed by studio Anne Hoffmann Graphic Design, she reviews thirty years of work. The selection comprises some 120 objects, featured in an annotated book diary. Besides this panorama, the book explores the topic of graphic design from a variety of perspectives. Statements by artists Chris Bünter, Miriam Cahn, and Claudio Moser; architect Kana Ueda Thoma; author and curator Peter Suter; jewellery designer Torben Hardenberg; museum director and curator Beat Wismer; musician Jürg Halter; and scholar Etienne Lullin reflect on the importance of the book per se and its design. Text in English and German.

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Constantin Brancusi (18761957), one of the most influential artists of the 20th century and a pioneer of modernism, is also referred to as the patriarch of modern sculpture. From A as in Africa to S as in Studio, D as in Dance, F as in Furniture or R for Reflections, this lavishly illustrated volume takes the open form of a dictionary to present Brancusi's celebrated art in its full richness. More than 110 entries contributed by leading Brancusi specialists form a complete panorama of his career, from his native Romania to Paris, where he established himself in 1903, and to the United States, where his work was on display for the first time at New York's legendary 1913 Armory Show.Published in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the book sheds new light on Brancusi''s creative process, his relationship with materials, his use of film, photography, and drawing, and his taste for music. It also addresses the global reception of his work and anal

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