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

Remembered as a pioneering and prolific Abstract Expressionist artist whose otherworldly sculptures seemed drawn from the ocean depths and distant galaxies, Ibram Lassaw (1913–2003) is less well known for his wearable sculptures. Like his large-scale works, the Bosom Sculptures as he called them, were inspired by Lassaw’s extensive readings on topics as varied as Zen Buddhism, cosmology, and quantum physics. Between 1951 and the late 1990s, Lassaw produced an extraordinary array of jewellery in forms quite unlike any other artist at the time. Employing unique combinations of metals as well as the many novel techniques, colours, and forms he had developed for his large sculptures, Lassaw’s welded and braised necklaces, though simple in design, remind us of everything from sea anemones to nebulae with their elaborate biomorphic tendrils and interconnected clusters. Published to coincide with an exhibition at Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, Quanta of Space: The Bosom Sculpture of Ibram Lassaw features 37 unique pendants and necklaces alongside nine full-size sculptures that Lassaw created between 1938 and 1996. Supplementing essays, offering insight into his life and times and the dynamic forces which inspired him, are contributed by Nancy G. Heller, professor emerita at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia; Denise Lassaw, the artist’s daughter, collaborator, and archivist; and Marin R. Sullivan, scholar of art history, curator, and writer.

Read more less

Temporality and age are inherent in every object and creature and, depending on one's outlook, may transcend to infinity. How can this be imagined? What goes beyond it? Swiss filmmaker Christoph Schaub sets out for a personal journey through time and space. He starts in his childhood, when his fascination with sacred buildings began, and also his wondering about beginnings and ends. In dialogue with architects Peter Zumthor, Peter Märkli, and Alvaro Siza, artists James Turell and Cristina Iglesias, and musician Jojo Mayer, Schaub explores the magic of sacred spaces, a term that for him represents much more than just churches. Architecture of Infinity traces spirituality in architecture and fine arts as well as in nature, and even over and above the limits of thought. The lightly floating camera immerses the viewer in somnambulistic images, taking him on a sensual and sensing journey through vast spaces, guiding his eye towards the star-spangled sky's infinity and the depths of the ocean. Past and present, primeval times and light years, it is all there. The running time of the film is 85 minutes, and the DVD is accompanied by a 32-page booklet with text in English and German.

Read more less

Lesley Dill is an American artist working at the intersection of language and fine art in printmaking, sculpture, installation and performance, exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche. Dill transforms the emotions of the writings of Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu, Tom Sleigh, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, into works of paper, wire, horsehair, foil, bronze and music — works that awaken the viewer to the physical intimacy and power of language itself. Lesley Dill – Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me features a uniquely inspired group of sculptures and two-dimensional works more than a decade in the making. It is testimony of Dill’s ongoing investigation into the significant voices and personas of America’s past. For the artist, the American voice grew from early America’s obsessions with divinity and deviltry, on fears of the wilderness out there and wilderness inside us. The plates, in colour throughout, are supplemented with essays by Lesley Dill, Brooklyn-based writer Nancy Princenthal, Figge Art Museum’s curator Andrew Wallace, and researcher and tribal historian Juaquin Hamilton-Youngbird. The book also features a literary text by writer by Tom Sleigh and a poem by author and poet Ray Young Bear.

Read more less

Situated at around 3,300 ft above sea level in the mountains of the Swiss Jura region, the town of La Chaux-de-Fonds experienced significant economic development towards the end of the 19th century, which went hand in hand with much building activity. There are few other places in Switzerland in which the influence of art nouveau is so clearly visible. Significantly inspired by the painter and architect Charles L’Eplattenier (1874-1946), and his art and decoration course at the local school of applied arts in 1905, a local variant of art nouveau developed, the so-called Style sapin or “fir style.” Protagonists of this movement accorded special importance in their works to the use of symbolic motifs that reflect the nature of the Jura landscape and especially its fir forests. This book offers a comprehensive survey of the Style sapin and builds bridges into the 21st century. It places the “fir style” within the international context of art nouveau and also addresses in detail the local facets of this movement, which has left traces that are still visible today in watchmaking, applied arts, and architecture. Moreover, it draws attention for the first time to the previously scarcely acknowledged female artists of the Style sapin. Text in French.

Read more less

Aenne Biermann (1898–1933) was one of the leading figures of photography in the 1920s and 1930s. Today, she is considered one of the most important avant-garde photographers of the 20th century. In just a few years of practice, the self-taught artist became a well-known representative of German photography, participating in almost all the important exhibitions of her time. She captured plants, objects, people, and everyday situations in pictures that have to this day lost none of their allure and poignancy. By means of clear structures, precise compositions of light and contrast, as well as narrow framing, she drew a special kind of poetry out of the motifs of her personal environment and developed her own, distinctly modern pictorial style. This is the first substantial new book in English on this exceptional artist since the 1930s, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in fall 2021. The large-format volume features some 100 of Aenne Biermann’s photographs in colour and duotone reproduction, several of them published here for the first time ever. This impressive selection is complemented by essays on Biremann’s photography in art-historical context and on selected aspects of her oeuvre. Text in English and Hebrew. An exhibition featuring the work of Aenne Biermann is taking place at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art from 5 August 2021.

Read more less

The completion of David Chipperfield's distinctive new building for Kunsthaus Zürich in December 2020 has nearly doubled the museum's overall space. In combination with the preceding refurbishments of the earlier buildings, this has made it fit to meet the demands of an art museum in the 21st century. A sequel to The Architectural History of the Kunsthaus Zürich 1910-2020, this book comprehensively introduces the new Kunsthaus Zürich, demonstrating how the task of building an art museum in the 21st century can be fulfilled. Concise texts, statements by protagonists and by future users and visitors as well as numerous illustrations trace the project's evolution and the construction process and look at the completed building from various perspectives. The book also highlights what features contemporary museum infrastructure has to offer and the architectural and urban design qualities it requires, and what financial and organisational challenges the entire undertaking implied. A conversation between experts exploring the expanded museum's impact on its immediate neighbourhood and Zurich's urban fabric as a whole rounds out the volume.

Read more less

Swiss artist Silvie Defraoui, born in 1935, is a pioneer of video art and art education in Switzerland. Beginning in 1975, she worked in collaboration with her husband Chérif Defraoui (1932–1994). Together they developed the Archives du Futur, a reflection on images, their status, and potential for memory and the future. The two artists also founded the legendary Atelier Médias Mixtes at Geneva’s École supérieure des Beaux-Arts (now HEAD—Genève). Since 1995, Defraoui has pursued a practice using various forms of expression, including projection, installation, ceramics, and serigraphy. This book is part of the new On Words series that presents conversations with contemporary women artists. Through them, readers come to understand the sources from which they draw inspiration, the themes in their work, and their view of the world. Edited by Julie Enckell, Federica Martini, and Sarah Burkhalter and bringing together a wide range of viewpoints, the On Words series adds a new narrative to polyphonic art history as told by those who actively shape it. Text in English and French.

Read more less

One of the world’s preeminent Abstract Expressionists, California-born painter Sam Francis (1923-1994) first travelled to Japan in 1957, quickly established studios and residences there, and became active in a circle of avant-garde artists, writers, filmmakers, architects, and composers, including members of the nascent Gutai and Mono-ha movements. This book chronicles those connections, as well as his complex and evolving relationship with East Asian aesthetics from the 1950s through the 1990s. From the very first exhibitions Francis had in Tokyo, critics linked his evocative use of negative space with the Japanese concept of “ma”, a symbolically rich interval between objects or ideas. This shared pictorial and philosophical syntax laid the foundation for a feedback loop of mutual influence that spurred frequent collaborations between the artist and his Japanese contemporaries, extending into the realms of printmaking, ceramics, music, poetry, publishing, and performance. Written by art critic and curator Richard Speer, with a foreword by Debra Burchett-Lere, executive director/president of the Sam Francis Foundation, this is the first full-length monograph to explore an important but sometimes overlooked milieu in Post-World War II art—a dialogue between Eastern and Western sensibilities that prefigured our current era of global interconnectedness and cross-cultural exchange. Lavishly illustrated with colour plates and archival images, it is an adjunct publication for the related exhibition “Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing” (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021), co-curated by Speer.

Read more less

Jean Otth (1940-2013) was a pioneer of video art in Switzerland. Even while studying art history and philosophy at the University of Lausanne and art at the Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne in the early 1960s he began to experiment with the then very new medium, making full use of its visual potential. Right from the beginning, Otth's artistic trajectory, which still was influenced by the practice of painting, became closely tied to the emergence of new technologies. His works were soon exhibited in Switzerland as well as at major international shows, such as the 1973 Biennale São Paulo, the 1976 Venice Biennale, and the Documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977. Throughout his career he mixed immaterial video projection with material reality, exploring their interaction. While constantly questioning the media he used, Otth produced borderline works that test the observer and provoke desire through covering-up, reframing, and shifting. This new monograph, the first book ever available in English on this remarkable artist, features photographic and filmed works as well as his drawings from all periods of his career. Text in English and French.

Read more less

Absolutely Augmented Reality takes as its subject the intersection of technology, fine art and the idea of authorship through a series of richly saturated, theatrical and symbolic images that use costume, character and allegory to create a sense of exploration and melancholic intrigue. In this dream world of strange and alluring portraiture, the viewer is delighted by a host of archetypal images, hybrid creatures, surreal motifs, canonical postures, as well as inversions of iconic art historic references. Appealing to fine art, design, and photography consumers alike, this new book features some 100 colour images from and Kuzma Vostrikov and Ajuan Song's previously unpublished art project. Alongside the photographs it offers a statement by the two artists and a brief introductory text by art historian Rosa J.H. Berland, as well as critical essays by art critic Anthony Haden-Guest and Lilly Wei, and an interview with Kuzma Vostrikov and Ajuan Song conducted by Iona Whittaker, and Arnau Salvadoe.

Read more less

Founded in 1841 and located since October 2019 in a striking new building by celebrated Spanish-Italian architects Barozzi Veiga, the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne (MCBA) is one of Switzerland's major public art galleries. It is home to an impressive permanent collection spanning eight centuries of art history that comprises manifold works by Swiss and international artists. This compact guide introduces 212 works from all periods represented in the collection with image and a concise text about its history and reception. An essay on the museum's development over 170 years as well as an index of artists round out the book. Text in French.

Read more less

A single Congo does not exist - or is in any case fictitious. Yet the Democratic Republic of Congo has an extraordinarily vibrant art scene that attracts great interest from around the world. Nowhere else in Africa art production is as manifold in form, media, and materials used. For many years, Congolese artists have been exploring and reflecting upon the effects of globalised trade, colonialism, proselytisation, and virtual boundaries. As the works of artists such as Sammy Baloji or Sinzo Aanza demonstrate, these effects never before were more topical than today. For the first time, this book, which is published in conjunction with an exhibition at Zurich's Museum Rietberg, features objects and photographs collected by the German anthropologist Hans Himmelheber during his journey to the Congo in 1938-39. The coloured masks, imposing figures, and richly decorated everyday objects bear witness to the period's extraordinary creativity and innovativeness as well as of the collector's own idea of Congo. They are juxtaposed with works by contemporary Congolese artists and complemented by essays that investigate the fiction of Congo both as an African and Western World imagination. Thus, the book links the past with the utopia of contemporary artistic production in central Africa.

Read more less

Over the period of twelve months, between May 2017 and 2018, Polish-born curator and critic Anda Rottenberg wrote a series of fictitious letters to legendary curator and writer Harald Szeemann (1933-2005). In these pieces, Rottenberg analyses the art and nature of curating and reveals references and relations in the history of art. She questions female artistic positions both in the Eastern and Western Europe and so encourages new individual readings of them. Her letters express a unique rhetoric that take up questions and polemic judgements to amalgamate individual opinion and objective knowledge into a personal history. This is the first publication of the much acclaimed new Muzeum Susch, an initiative of the Polish entrepreneur and art collector Grazyna Kulczyk and her Art Stations Foundation CH.

Read more less

At the peak of the 1968/69 students' riots at American Universities, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, together with Steven Izenour, pursued their Design and Research Studio on the topic of Las Vegas at Yale School of Architecture. The results of this were condensed into the book Learning from Las Vegas that became a classic almost instantly upon its first publication in 1972. The treatise excited the 1970s architecture world and has remained influential to architects, teachers and theoreticians to the present day. Some forty years later, Eyes that Saw: Architecture after Las Vegas offers a richly illustrated collection of essays by renowned scholars of art and architectural history, eminent architects, and artists, investigating Learning from Las Vegas and its heritage from various perspectives. Each chapter builds on the knowledge of the radical influence it had on architecture and urban design, visual art, and even on history more generally. Published alongside are documents from the Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates Archive at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an illustrated chronology of the resonance in international media following the publication of Learning from Las Vegas in 1972.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

During the 1970s and 1980s, the independent community media and various youth movements across Europe inspired and abetted each other. The young activists discovered the video tape as a medium and as a means to express their protesting mood and concerns. The easily produced moving images in videos soon also became also a weapon in the political and communication fights for the autonomous culture spaces the movement demanded in many countries. Videos were participative productions, done almost in real time and fast. This appropriation of video technology as means of two-way communication between sender and recipient also proved a key step towards the digital age. Today, consumers, citizens, and professionals not only receive moving images and audio documents. Anyone almost anywhere can produce and broadcast such pieces at no expense. The young activist-directors of the 1970s and 1980s went beyond dreaming of such a development. They explored it and experimented within small networks. 'Rebel Video' portrays protagonists of this activist movement in London, Basel, Berne, Lausanne, and Zurich. It documents what topics and concerns these creative rowdies picked-up and the lasting effect their work has until today. Richly illustrated and completed with brief essays by expert authors on specific aspects of film documentary and video art, the book demonstrates and illuminates the significance and manifold facets of the community media movement.

Read more less

Enraptured by Color presents some 170 French colour prints from the 19th century. Using colour at that time was a major factor in the market success of lithography, more than a century after its invention, as well as of other techniques. This new book, published to coincide with an exhibition at Musee Jenisch Vevey, is a compendium of the art of colour printmaking, using the exhibits as examples for all aspects of the trade. Introductory and topical essays and a selection of rare documents alongside the featured works reveal the effects of polychromy and the technical processes behind it in artistic production in France around 1890. The book explains in detail how colour engravings are made and how they differ from a colour print. It investigates the aesthetic purpose of using colour and how it was exploited by important artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, Paul Signac, Edouard Vuillard, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Read more less

The 21st century is unthinkable without its past of unrestricted scaling in almost any way of life. A key driver of technological progress is mankind's ability to imagine things at a larger, or smaller, scale; processes at higher, or slower, speed, or to virtually apply more or less energy to something. This ability has been evident ever since we began to produce and represent art, yet it gained an entirely different dimension with the onset of industrialisation in the 19th century. This new book collects essays by fourteen artists, designers, engineers, and scholars. They discuss the significance of scaling for their respective discipline and field of research. The initial point of a trans-disciplinary symposium at Zurich University of the Arts in 2015, on which the contributions in this book are based, was the camera. It combines fast and slow motion, and film speed - already three dimensions of scaling. The possibility to copy and print taken images adds a fourth one, replication, making this apparatus that seems to merely depict our world appear to be something of a much larger scale: a machine to produce thought and imagination.

Read more less

Fifty years after the passing of Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), this major new monograph illuminates the fundamental aspects of his oeuvre and technique in sculpture. It is based on years of extensive research and restoration work on seventy-five plasters that came to the collection of Kunsthaus Zurich as a bequest from Bruno Giacometti, Alberto's youngest brother. For Giacometti, plaster was of great importance as a material, far more than just an intermediate stage between clay model and bronze cast. It allowed him to paint or rework his objects in a vast variety of ways. A significant number of his sculptures indeed exist just in a plaster version. Featuring masterpieces from every stage of his career, this book focuses on Giacometti's artistic approach to the material nature of his chosen media, offering an insight into the creative process of one of the 20th century's greatest artists. With the plasters as a core, the selection also comprises works in other materials, such as marble, wood and bronze.

Read more less

Upon setting foot in Dhaka, with its beautifully landscaped gardens adorning ancient mosques and monuments, it becomes clear that this is a city steeped in history. One of the oldest settlements in Bangladesh, it is today among the largest cities in the world, and rapid, often unplanned, urbanisation has vastly outpaced sustainability, threatening the historic buildings and communities that make up the city's cultural soul. But, despite bursting at the seams, Dhaka's six centuries of history are still visible if we look carefully in the shadows of the tall buildings, in the spaces between the speeding cars. Dhaka-based architect Kashef Chowdhury's camera captures a record of the capital city of the local character that may soon be lost due to urban development. In Chowdhury's photographs, a woman hangs sheets of polythene to dry and resell, a blind man sings mystic love songs. Other photographs reflect Dhaka's state of social and cultural flux, like an image of weary night-shift workers returning from a wholesale market in the late morning or of the barely visible lights of a pick-up truck concealed to prevent theft. Chowdhury is one of South Asia's most renowned architects, and Dhaka: Memories or Lost constitutes his deeply personal tribute to the city.

Read more less

Christian Vogt has been working with photography for nearly fifty years. His ongoing dialogue with the medium has repeatedly given rise to a new image language, often putting him ahead of his time. Vogt's work can be regarded as an exploration of vision: for him, an image is always a projection screen, as each observer reacts differently to what is shown. Christian Vogt: The Longer I Look is the first monograph covering the entirety of his oeuvre. Some 350 images offer a comprehensive overview of Vogt's conceptual work, his philosophical inquiries, and his capacity to visualise the 'things behind things'. The book also features a brief introductory essay by Vogt himself and a conversation between the artist and curator Martin Gasser.

Read more less

The Swiss National Museum's permanent collection reflects Switzerland's history from pre-historic times until the present day. Each object also represents the location where it was found or made; the people who made or used it; a trade or profession; a personal or regional identity. Published to coincide with the opening of the new extension of the Landesmuseum in Zurich, Swiss National Museum's oldest and largest site, 26 Things features as many highlights from its collection, one from each of Switzerland's cantons. The selection ranges from a Celtic gold bowl from ca. 1500 BC (Zurich) to a miniature electro motor that propelled NASA's Mars rover Spirit in 2004 (Obwalden). It includes Switzerland's first snow gun of 1978 (Grisons) as well as a medieval Madonna sculpture (Valais) or a clock made in 1796 that once belonged to Napoleon (Neuchatel).The beautifully designed small book offers a varied Swiss panorama, taking the reader all around the country's twenty-six cantons, each with its own history and cultural identity.

Read more less

Peter Liechti (1951-2014) was a Swiss film author and director, cinematographer, and producer. Many of his more than 100 documentaries, music and experimental films have been shown at international festivals. His last and unfinished project Dedications he began when he already suffered from his terminal illness. Originally intended to become a trilogy dedicated to the Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956), the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-1880), and to "the unknown Sudanese Chief", the progress of his illness made him to alter his concept to a very personal review and reflection on his life's most significant personal and artistic impressions and moments. Liechti's widow and working partner Jolanda Gsponer, together with a group of his former collaborators, has assembled all the material of Dedications in three parts to preserve it and make the work visible. Part one is a filmed reading by Liechti from the diary he kept during his stays at the hospital and which was intended to be the film's underlying text. Part two is an audio-visual installation of the raw material for Dedications.Part three is this book, a self-contained publication of Liechti's entire diary, illustrated with some 100 video stills with captions, and including a DVD with the film's unedited 15 opening minutes.

Read more less

On 5 February 1916, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, together with Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, and Jean Arp, inaugurated the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The evening marked the birth of Dada as an artistic movement, and Cabaret Voltaire with its legendary performances became a place of historic significance. It was soon to be followed by the short-lived, while no less significant, Gallery Dada in Zurich, where the Dadaists staged four exhibitions over the course of half a year. Dada's further evolution was significantly shaped by these two spaces, each with its own particular atmosphere, constituting the differing poles of the Dada movement. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Spring 2016 to celebrate the Dada centenary, this new book for the first time tells the full story of Dada's genesis. It sheds light on the early years of 1916-17 in Zurich in historical context and, from today's point of view, and also explores the intellectual and social background that informed Dada, considering aspects such as the Great War, psychoanalysis, or the art scene of the time. Genesis Dada illustrates how Dada turned into a worldwide phenomenon with which artists and intellectuals such as Joan Miro, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau, or Man Ray were associated, and which has lost nothing of its momentum and topicality over time.

Read more less

Indonesia, a country spread over some 17,500 islands large and small; home of the world's largest fleet of ships and boats; with 252m people the fourth-largest country in the world in terms of inhabitants. A vast, manifold, surprising world in its own, of which very little is known outside the South-east Asian region. Beat Presser, Swiss-born photographer, travelled the Indonesian archipelago in 2012 and 2014. He went from place to place, from island to island, from adventure to adventure on all sorts of maritime vessels. He took photographs and notes and talked to the local people. He taught them the English language and discussed the topic of football with them. He encountered fellow travellers from China, and Australian oil explorers, and went diving with coast guard officers. From a wealth of experiences and memoirs of his journeys around this vast, astonishing country, Beat Presser has made this unique book that brings together his striking photographs and personal writings with short stories and poems by local authors.

Read more less

Le Corbusier‘s chapel Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp is arguably the most famous modern religious building and a UNESCO world heritage site. It has been photographed by millions of people, including some of the most distinguished architectural photographers. Austrian artist Siegrun Appelt took an entirely new approach to look at the iconic structure, distinct from all her famous predecessors. Appelt focuses with utter concentration on details, creating compositions of highest sensitivity and precision. Her images highlight the place’s spatial structure and lines, Le Corbusier’s ingenious direction of light, as well as surfaces and passages. They can be read as hints to these details and at the same time invite a conclusion from detail to the whole. This publication includes a dialogue between Claudia Kromrei and Otto Kapfinger, in which they investigate the potential of photography to show Le Corbusier’s means of expression and discuss the visualisation and perception of material and immaterial elements of this icon of 20th-century architecture. Text in English and German.

Read more less

Swiss artist Nesa Gschwend, born 1959 in St. Gallen, merges traditional crafts, such as embroidery, knitting, and sewing, with avant-garde and performative artistic techniques. Widely recognised as one of Switzerland's most distinguished contemporary artists, her art also combines craft with philosophy. Her textile works, material collages, videos, installations, and participatory performances transform individual lived stories into tangible metaphors for collective memory, for human existence itself. This new book features recent work by Nesa Gschwend. The essays explore her approach and describe her humanistic aspiration to transform existential questions into aesthetic reflection. Text in English and German.

Read more less

Light Scripture collects three photo essays by Swiss photographer Andreas Greber. Created over the course of two decades, Greber's photographs show simple scenes, such as fragments of a wall, translucent portraits, and wooded landscapes. Yet they are enigmatic and unsettling in that, while visible, their subjects escape the determination of shadow and light. For Greber, this is the essence of photography: inscribing with light. Presented in a dual English-German edition, Light Scripture brings together thirty-three of Greber's photographs in a beautiful, large-format book. It takes readers through the artist's process in the creation of the series, which explores the aesthetics and properties of photography with a special focus on how recent shifts in photography during the digital age call for a re-evaluation of its classic analogue variety. Greber's photographs are complemented by an essay by art critic Konrad Tobler. Text in English and German.

Read more less

Documented Landscape, the seventh volume in the Pictorial Worlds series, presents a selection of images from the archives of the Geobotanical Institute Rubel and of Carl Schroeter, which are being kept as part of the ETH Zurich's extensive image archive. Founded by Eduard Rubel (1876-1960) in 1918 in Zurich and later donated to the ETH, the 'Geobotanical Institute Rubel' conducted pioneering research in the area of botanical biodiversity in the Alps. Rubel's teacher, the botanist and ETH professor Carl Schroeter (1855-1939), was himself a pioneer of biodiversity and landscape conservation. Rubel and Schroeter were some of the earliest botanists to use photography as a means to document their research, thus making it available to a wider public and drawing attention to their early efforts in environmentalism. While the photo archives bear witness to a bygone era, their depiction of a changing landscape and progressing human interference are still strikingly on topic today. Sometimes showing near-arcadian scenes, the images are nevertheless highly realistic in their exact scientific documentation of the alpine biosphere. An in-depth introduction by historian and writer Ruedi Weidmann accompanies some ninety exceptional images selected from the comprehensive collection. Text in English and German.

Read more less

Public interest in art created by people suffering from mental illnesses has been growing in recent years, while the topic is still relatively exotic in the academic world. In a unique research project at Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK, art works produced around 1900 by patients in mental asylums and hospitals in Switzerland have been recorded, documented, and examined. Their authors worked on many of them for long periods, always with dedication, and often revealing remarkable technical and artistic prowess. They saw their art as a contribution to public life, as their own invention and expression of their ideas, but also as an act to compensate for the dull life at, and criticism of, the institutions they were being treated. This field of art, and of art history, is subject to the dynamics of academic standards and, consequently, of inclusions and exclusions. This new book, featuring a manifold selection of previously unpublished art works, questions our contemporary understanding of art, making the reader revisit his or her own concept of what constitutes art and to engage with these artists and their work.

Read more less

Swiss painter Robert Zund (1827-1909), also known in Switzerland as 'Master of the Beech Leaf', is revered for his light-flooded paintings of bucolic landscapes. Swiss photographer Tobias Madorin, born 1965, has gained international recognition for his tableau-like images that document the interaction between the inhabitants and their surrounding environment. This new book, published to coincide with an exhibition at Kunstmuseum Luzern in summer 2017, features work by both artists. Rather than merely enjoying the beauty of the sun-lit paradise Zund depicts in his precise manner, the book invites us to look more closely. For this purpose, Zund's paintings are juxtaposed with Madorin's photographs of the same views, captured today with an analogue large format camera. Thanks to the slowness of the procedure and the wealth of detail achieved in working with such an apparatus, Madorin's photographs boast an intensity comparable to that of Zund's paintings in terms of precision of the gaze. Observation, the gaze, and the aptitude to see is the real topic of this exhibition and accompanying book.

Read more less

In thirty-two cities across five continents, Swiss photographer Roger Eberhard booked a standard double room at the local Hilton and took two photographs: one of the room's interior, always from the same perspective, and one of the view from the hotel room's window. The result of this project is Roger Eberhard - Standard, an unusual urban panorama of sixty-four photographs, reproduced large enough to make it easy to see the diversity within the uniformity of one of the world's largest international hotel chains. In this era of increasing globalisation and commercialisation, Roger Eberhard - Standard shows that international hotel chains, restaurants, and similar establishments maintain a remarkably uniform design - a true standard - that has made many places and cities feel almost interchangeable. At the same time, they retain some of their unique characteristics, and Eberhard's photographs reveal the subtle, yet important, influence of local taste. The book also contains an essay by German novelist Benedict Wells on the monotony he feels while staying in successions of hotel rooms on book tours, as well as essays by art historian Franziska Solte and curator Nadine Wietlisbach.

Read more less

Peter Hachler (1922-99) ranks among the most revered and formerly most radical sculptors in contemporary Swiss art. Geometric rigor as well as an intuitive playfulness distinguish Hachler's work. The range of materials he used for his sculptures is another striking characteristic of his art. In the 1970s, Hachler began experimenting with industrial materials - such as concrete, plastic, cast iron, or stainless steel - creating vast works for display in public spaces, some of them conceived as art-in-architecture projects. This new monograph, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich in autumn 2015, looks at Peter Hachler's art from today's perspective. It features nearly forty of his sculptures in photographs newly taken for this book. An essay by distinguished Swiss art historian Martino Stierli contextualises Hachler's oeuvre in postwar Swiss art, while curator Sabine Schaschl explores his life and inspirations in conversation with his widow Eva and his daughter Gabrielle.

Read more less

Born as the youngest of a poor Swiss farming family's seven children, Adolf Dietrich (1877-1957) supplemented arduous farm work and various jobs in a textile mill, as a woodcutter, and railway worker, with art. Gaining increasing recognition in Germany and Switzerland, his participation in the exhibition Les maitres populaires de la realite in Paris, Zurich, and New York in 1937-38 marked his breakthrough internationally. Until today, Dietrich's work is regarded by some as a prime example of 20th-century naive painting, while other scholars place him closer to the post-expressionist movement of New Objectivity. For the first time in nearly sixty years, Dietrich's work has been shown in a vast retrospective at Kunstmuseum Olten in Switzerland, in summer 2015 in which his pictures were accompanied by paintings of artists such as Cuno Amiet, Otto Dix, Giovanni Giacometti, Ferdinand Hodler, Henri Rousseau, or Felix Vallotton. This coinciding new monograph is richly illustrated in colour throughout, featuring some 160 works by Dietrich and the other artists. The essays contextualise his art and highlight Dietrichs' lasting significance.

Read more less

Vaclav Pozarek, born 1940 in former Czechoslovakia, is regarded as one of the most significant figures in contemporary Swiss art. After his emigration in 1968 he did his artistic education at Hamburg's University of Fine Arts and at St. Martin's School of Art in London. He has been living and working in Bern since 1973, creating a much-recognised oeuvre, mainly in drawing and sculpture. This new monograph, published to coincide with a solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Solothurn and designed by Pozarek himself, offers a survey of his drawings, sculptures and installations from the past ten years. The essays explore his work and discuss his recent exhibitions.

Read more less

Esther Eppstein is an artist and art educator and a pivotal figure in Switzerland's cultural life. 1996-2013 she ran her message salon in Zurich, a space for experimental art that soon became a legend and an institution. It was located in various buildings, all of them bound for demolition, and 1998/99 also in an old caravan. The caravan was later purchased by the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art in Zurich for its permanent collection. Throughout its seventeen years, message salon was a cultural beehive humming with artists and art lovers. This new book is a review of the message salon's entire existence and a gallery of people making it what it was: young artists, whom Eppstein offered a first chance to present themselves, the more established ones who could re-invent themselves in this laboratory, and also the public and celebrities who came to admire, experience, and to see and be seen. Richly illustrated with some 800 photographs, Esther Eppstein - message salon is also an homage to an extraordinary personality. The essays tell the story and reflect on the significance of this unique social sculpture.

Read more less

When does a war begin and when does it really end? Every war leaves traces, scars in the landscape, and people's resultingtraumas are passed from one generation to the next. Post-war times can also become the years before a war.Over ten years, Swiss photographer Meinrad Schade has recorded the precarious life oscillating between war and peace in parts of Russia, Chechnya and Ingushetia, in Kazakhstan, the Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh region, and in Ukraine. His portraits, still lifes, interiors, street scenes, and landscapes introduce the viewer to remote places and preliminary events. Schade's images show the long-term effects of old conflicts on people. This new book features a selection of some 160 images from Schade's "War Without War project". The essays tell the history of the countries and their conflicts, look at the decline and struggle for resurrection of the Soviet empire, and reflect on chances and restrictions of documentary photography.

Read more less

Celestial mechanics have fascinated mankind in all known cultures. Many artists throughout history have been captivated by the spectacle we observe above us day and night. Swiss photographer Guido Baselgia has expanded the focus of his work on the sky, with the stellar and solar movements and phenomena as we see them from earth. In his most recent work Light Fall, Baselgia makes traceable the trajectory of celestial bodies invisible to the human eye and shows astounding occurrences of light and shadow. Taken in Norway, the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in Argentina, in Ecuador, and the Swiss Alps, the images visualise the geometry of astrodynamics and celestial mechanics. His photography also captures the phenomenon of umbra, planet earth's shadow thrown into space. The new book Guido Baselgia - Light Fall features 80 stunning tritone plates. Complemented with essays by German scholar Andrea Gnam and Swiss photography critic Nadine Olonetzky, they offer a window into the light phenomena that leave us awestruck today as much as they did our ancestors.

Read more less

The Image Archive of the main library at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH-Bibliothek) is home to a vast collection of photographs. It includes material collected by professors and other staff at the ETH, images created and collected by institutes and chairs within the ETH, but also the entire archives of companies or other institutions, such as Switzerland's legendary former national airline Swissair (1931 - 2001), or private collections bequeathed to ETH-Bibliothek. The aim of the new book series 'Pictorial Worlds. Photographs from the ETH-Bibliothek's Image Archive' is to build a bridge between analytical treatment of historical image sources and the interest in individual photographs for any possible reason. One of the collections held at the Image Archive has been put together by Swiss entrepreneur Adolf Feller (1879 - 1931) and his daughter Elisabeth (1910 - 1973). Unique in size, scope and period covered, it comprises 54,000 postcards from 1889 - 1980. It documents comprehensively what can be called the Golden Age of picture postcards before World War I, with its enormous diversity of motifs, radical changes of style in design and when postcards had their heyday as a communication medium. The collection's main focus is on images of individual sites, places and landscapes in 140 countries. Around 15,000 motifs are from Switzerland. The period best represented in the collection is from 1893 - 1930. The World in Pocket-size Format is a documentation of this magnificent collection. The book is also an illustrated history of this means of communication that has had its time of utmost importance in human relationships.

Read more less

Andre Thomkins is renowned as an artist treating imagery, forms and materials as well as language in playful and experimental ways. His mastery of the classical visual art media was unparalleled, yet he also experimented with different techniques and materials. Within Thomkins's oeuvre, his works of the 1950s in particular are characterised by a pronounced love of experimentation. During this period, he developed his Lackskins by 'painting' with gloss paint on water. He had stumbled across this special technique by chance: cleaning his paint brushes in water, he noticed that the gloss paint he had used left a film on the surface that formed an image. He began deliberately manipulating that floating film of paint and eventually lifted the resulting image from the water with a sheet of paper, achieving 'something planetary, very light and fluctuating' (Andre Thomkins). This wonderful book, 'Andre Thomkins: Lackskins' is the first comprehensive presentation of these beautiful works. Text in English & German.

Read more less

"On Common Ground" is a photographic history of spatial development in post-war Switzerland illustrated through 250 images with complementing essays. The development of settlements is documented by the idealised examples of Schlieren, which grew from an agricultural village to an industrial town and eventually to a cluster of service firms and residential suburbs of Zurich, and the Upper Engadine, the world famous mountain resort around St. Moritz in the Canton of Grisons. The authors have put together a vast collection of photographs found in archives of all sorts: local government offices, building companies, local and national newspapers, publishers of postcards, cultural heritage societies and amateur photographers. Such images have rarely been collected and analysed systematically. "On Common Ground" presents these pictures in a double-track, chronological sequence: the top part of each page shows Schlieren, the Upper Engadine takes the bottom half. The concept reveals manifold references, discrepancies and parallels between the two places. It makes traceable the passing of time and all the changes it imposes at times synchronically, in some periods at a different pace in each place. Some developments unfold at great speed in one place and stemmed in the other. Text in English and German.

Read more less

Roger Eberhard, Swiss-born and American-educated photographer, conceives his works as series, taking-up impulses and inspirations for new projects from any possible source, such as a story he learns about or media reports catching his attention. He is particularly fascinated by people in the landscape, or rather the absence of mankind from a place leaving it again to nature and weather. But he has also done series of portraits of people in their given environment. Some series he has created in collaboration with other artists. In late 2008 Eberhard set out for a campaign searching for the visually lyrical backstage of the United States. His road-trip stared in Reno, Nevada, and led him through the states of Montana, North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Wyoming to Denver, Colorado. From there he continued his journey to Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and finally across Arizona back to Nevada. The resulting series 'Wilted Country' is published for the first time in this book. The resulting, highly atmospheric photographs show the enduring impact humans have on their landscape and simultaneously offer an evocative tour through the past and present of the American West. The images are accompanied by essays by Anthony Bannon, director of George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY, and by the young German novelist Benedict Wells.

Read more less

Credit Suisse, one of the two major international banks in Switzerland, has been putting together a corporate collection of Swiss contemporary art since 1975. The bank aims in particular to acquire representative groups of works by individual artists. The collection currently comprises around 5000 items. It also includes art-in-architecture objects that have been created for designated locations and buildings. The artists represented in the collection include internationally recognised names such as John Armleder, Balthasar Burkhard, Yves Netzhammer and Monica Studer/Christoph van den Berg. Credit Suisse Collection documents this unique collection for the first time. Twenty objects for designated locations and groups of works by 30 artists are presented comprehensively. Essays on specific aspects of the collection and a complete illustrated catalogue complete the book. As a particular conceptual feature of the book, the art works are shown in their normal presentation in the bank's offices rather than being highlighted in a neutral museum context. This represents interesting contrasts and relations between architecture and art. Contains essays by Maria Becker, Barbara Hatebur, Giulia Passalacqua, Magdalena Plüss and Andre Rogger. With a preface by Hans-Ulrich Doerig. Text in English & German. AUTHOR: Andre Rogger is head of Credit Suisse s art unit and lecturer in the history of art at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Barbara Hatebur is a research assistant with Credit Suisse s art unit. SELLING POINTS: . Presents a leading collection of contemporary Swiss art . Features work by fifty important Swiss artists 405 colour, 256 b/w illustrations

Read more less

Bianca Brunner is a young Swiss photographic artist whose work has gained considerable international recognition and acclaim. Following a degree in visual communication at the School of Art and Design Zurich in 1997 she continued her artistic education at the London College of Communication and the Royal College of Art London. In 2005 she was selected to participate in the travelling exhibition 'ReGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow', concieved by the Musee de l'Elysee in Lausanne (Switzerland) and shown also in Milan (2005), New York (2006) and Pingyao (China, 2006). She has been featured also in several group exhibitions in London, Madrid, Germany, Belgium and Italy. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Aperture Foundation (New York City), the University Art Collection (London) and the Musee de l'Elysee (Lausanne, Switzerland), and has been published in several books. Brunner has also been awarded several prizes in the UK and Switzerland. 'Bianca Brunner: Gap in the Real' is the first monograph on Brunner's work, presenting around 50 of her recent images. The majority have not been published before and will be shown for the first time in a solo exhibition at the Bundner Kunstmuseum Chur (Chur, Switzerland) in autumn 2010.

Read more less

James Baldwin's perennial essay as a starting point for artistic exploration of racism.James Baldwin (19241987) penned his famous essay Stranger in the Village in the early 1950s during a stay in the Swiss Alpine village of Loèches-les-Bains. It is the starting point for an artistic examination of the subject of racism in Switzerland, and in the art and culture industries in particular, that is documented in this multilingual French/German book.Works by international contemporary artists including Igshaan Adams, Kader Attia, Omar Ba, James Bantone, Marlene Dumas, Melanie Grauer, Jonathan Horowitz, Sasha Huber, Pierre Koralnik, Glenn Ligon, Martine Syms, and othersreact to Baldwin's literary-political treatise. Essays contributed by distinguished authors supplement the artistic debate and highlight the consequences of the prevailing structural racism.The book is an invitation to break taboos. It holds a mirror up to us, raising questions that concern us

Read more less

Unexpected events in the present can in the long term affect our view of both the past and the future. Dealing with this fundamental uncertainty as an artist characterises the work of Silvie Defraoui, born 1935, and also determines her Archives du Futur, the platform for artistic reflection she initiated in 1975 together with her late partner Chérif (1932–94). This elegant book features some 40 works that Defraoui has created since 1994, using the media of video, painting, neon, and photography. Some of them have been newly created for her major solo exhibition at the MCBA in Lausanne in the spring 2023 and are published in this book for the first time. All of them bear witness to continuous change and impressively illustrate the metamorphosis of the Archives du Futur, which has now been in existence for almost five decades. Laurence Schmidlin’s essay offers a new approach to Defraoui’s artistic ideas and concepts. Text in English, French and German.

Read more less

Taiwanese contemporary artist Yao Jui-chung has gained international renown for his imaginative, bold and incisive, and often humorous critiques of his country’s complex and contested identity and history. Born in 1969, Yao grew up during a tumultuous period, when Taiwan transformed from authoritarianism to democracy. His art, which comprises photography, video, installation, and painting, draws inspiration from history, politics, and society, and from China’s and Taiwan’s ancient artistic and religious traditions and mythical worlds. As well as being an artist, Yao also works as a curator and writer and has published several books on Taiwanese art. This monograph is the first-ever comprehensive study of Yao Jui-chung’s work in English, examining his practice over the past three decades. Featuring more than 200 images, it offers an essay by scholar, curator and Taiwan art specialist Sophie McIntyre and an in-depth interview with the artist by Hou Hanru, the artistic director of Rome’s MAXXI. The book will appeal to specialists, collectors, and students of art, as well as scholars and students in Taiwan and China studies, politics, and history.

Read more less

The famous Lion Monument in Lucerne, located in a park in the heart of the city, commemorates the Swiss Guards in the service of the French King Louis XVI who fell in the storming of the Tuileries Palace in Paris on August 10, 1792. The monument, hewn directly into the rockface according to a design by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, was inaugurated on August 10, 1821. Together with the nearby Glacier Garden, it is today one of the Swiss city’s major tourist attractions. To mark the memorial’s bicentenary, the Kunsthalle Lucerne launched the Lion Monument 21 program of exhibitions, performances, podiums, and interdisciplinary events. Between 2017 and 2021, they considered the monument from an artistic standpoint. The art projects demonstrated a wide range of artistic stances and related the monument to a variety of themes. This book documents the entire project through some 400 images, texts, and conversations. It also constitutes a socially committed reference book for the artistic contextualisation of monuments, which records and reflects on the insights of the Lion Monument 21 project. Text in English and German.

Read more less