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.
The unique convergence of architecture and landscape found on the Bernina Pass inspired Swiss photographer Guido Baselgia to create a visual epic. The result is a one-of-a-kind presentation of the new road maintenance base near Bernina Pass, designed by renowned Swiss firm Bearth & Deplazes Architekten, in a seemingly arctic winter landscape. Baselgia explored the territory along the road and railway line with his analogue camera. His images also draw a connection between the existing infrastructures for traffic and energy production – built over the course of the landscape’s industrialisation and continued development since the late 19th century – to the architecture of the new maintenance base.
A concavely curved shield wall topped by a round tower is all that is visible of this vast, purely functional, and largely underground space. The shield wall cuts a segment from the existing topography and thereby encloses a courtyard along with an area of the surrounding landscape. The tower refuses direct encoding – until entering the camera obscura at its very top, which connects photography, architecture, and landscape to reveal that this place is about insights and not outlooks.
The book features a selection of Guido Baselgia’s striking photographs and reproductions of camera obscura images from the tower in outstanding duotone reproduction and documents Bearth & Deplazes’ architecture through concise texts, images, and selected plans.
Text in English, German and Italian.
This book offers a review of Matteo Pugliese’s art over the past 20 years. The figures the Milanese sculptor creates are distinguished by their great power, revealing an inner torment that can no longer be disguised. The men depicted in his sculptures are all trying to break free of the wall that holds them, to throw off their limitations and assert their value as individuals in the hopes of escaping from dull uniformity and social and family expectations. These are people who are attempting to achieve a painful rebirth by struggling against materialised restraint — a wall — that seeks to prevent them expressing themselves, growing and therefore existing. The artist chooses to portray the moment of greatest effort, of supreme tension, the instant when a man regains control of his life and struggles against what is holding him trapped so as to restore a sense of purpose in his life. The carefully studied poses of his figures recall ancient models, in the same way as the material from which they are fashioned is also ancient. Luigi Spina’s lens knowingly lingers on these figures’ troubled birth and enables the reader, admirer, and art historian to acquire an intimate understanding of the sculpture and even to feel a part of the travails and manifest vulnerability that grip all of humanity.
Text in English and Italian.
This attractive little volume takes us on a visual journey through the greatest splendours of China’s varied geography and the chief monuments of its 5,000-year-old civilization. Its 243 colour photographs, which include 12 panoramic gatefolds, show us the country’s most famous landmarks-like the Forbidden City and the Great Wall-as we have never seen them before, and introduce us to less familiar but just as fascinating sights, like the multicoloured travertine lakes of Huanglong Valley and the beautiful calligraphic inscriptions on the rugged rocks of Mount Taishan. Extended captions at the back of the book provide a concise introduction to the history and significance of each of the forty-four locales depicted, 28 of which have been designated as World Heritage sites by UNESCO.
Chinese architect Pu Miao has long explored the development of modern Chinese architecture from a localised perspective. As he has learned from his practice, the integration of architecture and landscape promises to be one of the main directions for localisation. This volume selects 15 architectural designs from Miao’s practice since the 1990s; 12 of them have been constructed and written about in international and Chinese professional journals and books. The building types include restaurant, retail, exhibition, worship, residence, education, and public facilities. The projects illustrate four modes of integrating buildings and landscape: using outdoor spaces as alternatives for indoor activities; architecture and landscape each playing a unique role in a functional pair; architecture partially taking the form of landscape; and gardens as urban public spaces in a building. Through detailed analyses of design concepts, a large number of building photos and drawings (including wall sections for some projects), this book acts not only as a virtual tour of these places, but also provides meticulous design documentation. Today, it is very rare for an architect to practice by him/herself. Pu Miao has proved that such a traditional craftsman’s mode of practice is still possible; more than that, he inspires us to see that the modes of architectural practice need not to be as uniform as many believe. There are actually many possibilities, as long as you dare to imagine and to try. Perhaps Pu Miao’s initial objective was to control the building detailing as much as possible, which he has accomplished, but meanwhile he has also become a special banner of independent practice in China.
Text in English and Chinese.
Appreciation of the works by the German artist couple Annelies and Fred Stelzig from Besigheim in the discipline of art made for architecture has been a long time coming. To mark the 100th anniversary of them both, the town of Besigheim has made this its task. For the large retrospective, a publication is launched that focuses on the incredible breadth of their production for the very first time. Waiting to be discovered alongside wall ceramics and carpets are works in wood, glass, and enamel. Numerous contributions by authoritative experts present the personal backgrounds of the couple, trace lines of development, and highlight the material specificities of their works. Over 300 illustrations additionally provide a lively impression of the couple’s ability to be versatile yet at the same time retain continuity during their long creative period, from the 1950s to their last work in 2006.
With contributions by Christian Behrer, Dieter Büchner, Christiane Fülscher, Sabine Gärttling, Inken Gaukel, Regina Ille-Kopp, Andreas Janssen, Cornelia Marinowitz, Martha Pflug-Grunenberg, and Sandy Richter.
Text in German.
Palazzo Vecchio, which towers over piazza della Signoria, at the centre of Florence, is an iconic building and from the Middle Ages to the Medici family to present day it has been the seat of civic power.
Among its most admired features are the marvellous grotesque decorations which animate the walls and vaults of the courtyard and several rooms. Grotesques are a type of wall decoration, in stucco or fresco, often with the addition of gold, that developed in the Renaissance when the vaults of the Domus Aurea in Rome, which were underground (considered grottos hence the name), were rediscovered by artists who drew inspiration from those designs.
Palazzo Vecchio’s grotesques are lively, extravagant ornaments, generated by the creativity of artists – among whom Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio (1483-1561) and Marco Marchetti da Faenza (ca. 1526-1588) stand out – and they include, birds, flowers, vegetation and many strange creatures that have a mixture of human and animal traits.
The Swiss Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale exhibits itself and the relations to its immediate surroundings. The exhibition is a conversation over the shared boundary of the pavilions of Switzerland (1952, designed by Bruno Giacometti) and Venezuela (1954, designed by Carlo Scarpa), the only two in the Giardini not fully detached: they share one wall. Artist Karin Sander and art historian Philip Ursprung temporarily open this wall and dismantle the gates from the Swiss Pavilion, thus revealing unanticipated connections between the two neighbours, both distant and close.
The complementing book offers a manifesto, a play with the two buildings as dramatis personae, and three brief topical essays. Ten conversations with architectural historian Kurt W. Forster, photographers Paolo Gasparini and Guido Giudi, and Venezuelan architects Elisa Silva and Margarita López-Maya round off this volume.
In the 1950s, a large number of internationally renowned artists created pictures made of ceramic. In 1956, in close collaboration with the artist and ceramicist Richard Bampi, Julius Bissier developed a ceramic work for the University of Freiburg. The abstract composition on a wall in the city centre measures over 19.5 metres long by 2.6 metres high (64 × 8.5 feet). Its restoration and relaunch is occasion to examine more closely the story of its genesis. The distinctiveness of the artwork becomes clear against a backdrop of the cultural politics oriented on France in Freiburg after 1945. Unexpected parallels in contemporaneous ceramic murals by Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, and Victor Vasarely are revealed and make the Freiburg ceramic picture a unique work in the post-war art of Germany.
Text in German.
Upon his arrival in New York in the 1960s, Istanbul-born artist Burhan Doğançay (1929–2013) became deeply fascinated by the visual aesthetics of urban walls and murals. His interest focused on exploring public space and its significance as a forum for the debate of social and political as well as artistic norms. He continuously sketched and photographed walls and doorways, transferring many of the captured motifs into paintings. Over more than four decades, Doğançay compiled a vast body of photographic testimonials of urban life and discourse which he titled Walls of the World: a unique archive comprising some 30,000 images from 114 countries.
This bilingual French–German book features a selection of Doğançay’s paintings and photographs from various series within the entire Walls of the World collection. The pictures — like the walls themselves — are the result of superimposed layers and techniques. Through this use of different painting and collage techniques, they reflect the temporal dimension of these surfaces with the scribbles, posters, scraps, and graffiti accumulated on them. The essays that supplement the images investigate Doğançay’s ongoing engagement with the urban wall as a projection surface as well as his method of combining photography and sketching as the basis for his remarkable graphic and painted art.
Text in French and German.
What do the Great Wall of China, Georgia’s polyphonic singing, the Mediterranean diet and the Vanuatu sand drawings have in common? Despite their evident dissimilarity, they are all protected by UNESCO, the supranational organisation that is responsible for preserving the common cultural heritage of humanity, protecting it from disappearance and ensuring its conservation for future generations. The Great Wall of China is one of the natural and cultural sites that comprise the famous list of World Heritage Sites, compiled by UNESCO while the other three are part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage list that includes immaterial goods. In fact, in 2003, the UNESCO General Conference adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage with the intent to safeguard the traditional cultures and folklore of our planet. Today, over 400 practices and expressions from more than 100 countries represent the riches and demonstrate the cultural diversity of the populations in the world. Appearing on this variegated list of traditions are the art of the ‘pizzaiuoli’ – the pizza makers of Naples, the Carnival of Basel, the Rebetiko music of Greece, Japanese kabuki theatre, Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebration, the Brazilian capoeira, Chinese shadow puppetry and the mass Hindu pilgrimage of faith, Kumbh Mela. This book of photographs and splendid illustrations will guide you on your discovery of the Intangible Cultural Heritage list; a journey that will open your eyes to the cultural riches of our planet and to the importance of preserving them for future generations.
The photobook No Fat Poetry is a democratic marriage of image and text, without any subordination or superordination of either. Nowadays, new media communicates a hitherto unimagined quantity of images. This means that, today, images are far more dependent on their context, and it is within these contexts that they generate an importance that may change, depending on where the image appears or who or what the image is juxtaposed with — in this case, text and typography. The origins of the texts are democratic too, and almost all of them are recycled (samplings). They are quotes by artists and photographers; they come from the street or from photo — graphic theory or aesthetics. Ultimately, the involvement of the photographers is also democratic, including newcomers and established photographers alike (e.g., Thomas Demand, Alex Prager, Jörg Sasse, Alec Soth, Josef Sudek, Jürgen Teller, Jeff Wall).
Text in English and German.
Slash & Burn presents some of Marcin Dudek’s key creations, focusing on what he refers to as ‘Memory Boxes’ and touching on other elements of practice including collage, performance, sculpture and research.
Marcin Dudek was just 12 years old and living in a concrete housing block outside Krakow, Poland, when the Berlin Wall finally toppled. Poland’s free-fall into capitalism followed as the country reeled from severe shortages, skyrocketing inflation and suddenly-defunct industry. For many, food was scarce. Money, more than hard to come by. A frayed social fabric, lacking civic associations left children vulnerable to new allegiances. Before becoming a teenager, he followed his older brother into the arms of a wild group of football supporters who created havoc in and outside the local stadium. Over time, many from this group moved from the council estate into the prison block as petty crimes escalated into enterprising criminal endeavours. Thanks in part to his sister, Dudek found an alternative path, moving to Salzburg, Austria to attend University of Art Mozarteum. He found work in art galleries, learned German and later moved to London, earning an MFA at Central Saint Martin’s.
Art as methodology for living, coupled with the DIY survivalist strategies of his youth, became tools for transformation as well as dealing with childhood trauma. Shortly after settling in Brussels in 2012, he began to publicly question and explore his past in the seminal exhibition Too Close for Comfort. Marcin Dudek is represented by Haarlen Levy Projects in Brussels.
Chip7Land is a chaotic, energetically produced monograph that highlights some of Chip’s work over the last 20 years. Executed in his ‘techno- organic’ style he moves freely between wall and canvas, always expressing himself with vivid colours that leap off the pages. Art directed by Chip himself this pocket size book is an artwork to itself and will transport instantly to Bangkok, Thailand.
Investigations by Sara Penco stem from the insightful finding of the absence of a key figure in the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgement fresco. Prior to this illuminating research, Mary Magdalene was not unequivocally identified within Michelangelo’s masterpiece. Father Pfeiffer, with whom Penco establishes an inescapable dialectic, had already hypothesised the presence of Mary Magdalene in the fresco, but it is the scholar, for the first time in these pages, who convincingly justifies her identification. Mary Magdalene is closely connected to the salient episodes in the life of Jesus. The author rightly wonders, therefore, how it is possible that a figure so central to the biblical narrative and the Christian imagination could have been excluded from the depiction of the Parousia. This observation gives rise to an accurate reflection on the iconography of the saint and the Judgement, in relation to the sacred texts and in relation to Michelangelo’s poetics and production. Sara Penco traces Mary Magdalene in the tangle of figures on the wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel, contributing to characterise the fresco – one of the best known and most appreciated works in the world – with an unprecedented theological message.
Text in English and Italian.
Life Beat Soft Melt presents a new series of works by Erwin Wurm, introducing here, alongside his iconic One Minute Sculptures, a wall painting installation, which extends his sculptural concept.
A cheerful colourism, language, emotions, time and space, sculpture and happenings merge here into an elemental experience. Known for transforming the traditional medium of sculpture into something more fluid, participatory, and playfully subversive, Wurm expands his sculptural language beyond objects to include space, painting, and drawing. His art concept invites viewers not only to observe the works but also to become part of them.
Text in English and German.
David Czupryn takes an opposite approach. He does not aim to trick us into believing that his surreal visual worlds are real. His images recall theatre stages where human hybrids appear next to carefully arranged still lifes whose different textures are meticulously depicted. In the spirit of classical trompe-l’œil painting, Czupryn is a master of aesthetic deception who translates the pictorial language and techniques of past ages into the present and skillfully integrates numerous references to the history of art and religion, iconography and allegory, politics and society into his paintings.
Text in English and German.
Painter, draftsman and engraver, Pierre Lesieur (1922-2011) was one of the most influential French artists of the second half of the 20th century. Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris – where he took lessons from André Lhote – and at the Académie de Montmartre, he had his first exhibition in 1952.
Lesieur’s paintings of the 1950s are characterised by the use of brightly coloured areas, in line with the work of Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. In the 1960s, this research bordered on abstraction, particularly in still lifes and representations of objects. From the 1970s onwards, through his paintings and drawings, Lesieur took a particular interest in interiors, as well as in portraits and female nudes.
Early in his career, Pierre Lesieur was recognised as an important artist. After his first personal exhibition in 1952, his work was regularly shown at the Coard Gallery in Paris. From the 1990s, Lesieur’s notoriety became international, resulting in further exhibitions in Japan and the United States. Some of his works are now housed in major museums such as the Center Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hiroshima Museum.
Text in English and French.
Colour is at the core of our perception, the very essence of how we see and understand the world, but the question to ask is: how does one interpret it?
Six well-known British artists – David Batchelor, Ian Davenport, Lothar Götz, Jim Lambie, Annie Morris, Fiona Rae – have interpreted in different ways, the relationship of colour within space.
Colour is the main protagonist of their works: it can be found in Batchelor’s sculptures assembled with found objects, in the coloured trails of Davenport’s paintings, in Fiona Rae’s delicate, floating marks on white surfaces, and in Annie Morris’ sculptures that powerfully define the environment. Finally, the colour comes out of the paintings to invade the walls and the floor of the Gallery itself, with two site-specific creations: an entire wall painted by Lothar Götz, and Zobop, the floor made of vinyl by Jim Lambie.
Text in English and Italian.
Nicole Bottet encapsulates time.
The singular expression of an artistic career that doesn’t fit into any specific school, delicately presents itself and lets us into an intimate space, a sacred place of muted dialogues. Ungrounded and yet firmly rooted, her large paintings are paralleled by a long trail of letters, photos, old adverts.
A bouquet withers on the canvas, its petals fall onto a father’s letter, a declaration of love bursts out of a tablecloth. Conversations become paintings. A red glow slips behind the mountain of letters.
The unique demonstration of the sweetness of life amid everyday torment, this painting brings us face to face with a nude haloed in light, a sun-drenched wall, it discovers the sparkle of a crystal, the spontaneity of a vivid red, a deep green. Suspended like a star, gold shines through the obscurity.
The work of Nicole Bottet can be seen in private collections and museums throughout Europe, Japan, China, the United States and Canada.
Text in English and French.
Giovanni Segantini’s (1858–99) three paintings La Vita—La Natura—La Morte (Becoming—Being—Passing) of 1898/99 do not reveal at first glance anything about their equally complex and interesting background. Originally planned for the 1900 Paris Exposition of 1900 as a gigantic, multimedia “Alpine symphony” panorama 722 ft long and 66 ft high, Segantini was forced to reduce his work to three purely pictorial main paintings, owing to a lack of financial means. When he died in 1899, whilst still working on it, he left behind an incomplete triptych that was intended to embody “the spirit of nature, of life, and of death.”
In this book, Swiss art historian and Segantini-expert Juerg Albrecht traces this monumental landmark piece in the artist’s oeuvre as one of the last programmatic works of fin de siècle art. Apart from its genesis, the book explains, as well the cycle of life and death that the three paintings visualise, whose origins Segantini sought both privately and creatively in the mountains of the upper Engadine valley during his lifetime.
Text in English and German.
Vincent van Gogh’s short, passionate life was driven by an almost unimaginable creative energy that eventually overwhelmed him. The outlines of his story – the early strivings in Holland and Paris, the revelatory impact of the move to Provence, the attacks of madness that led ineluctably to his suicide – are almost as familiar as the paintings. Yet it is more than possible that neither the paintings nor Van Gogh’s story would have survived at all if it had not been for his remarkable sister-in-law, Jo van Gogh-Bonger. After Vincent’s death and that of her husband, his brother Theo, Jo devoted her life to preserving and exhibiting the paintings, and editing the letters. It is in her short and unaccountably neglected biography that we can come closest to Vincent the man.
Jean Fautrier (1989-1964) was a major 20th century artist. Trained at the Royal Academy of Arts and influenced by J.M.W. Turner, he was quickly noticed by the collector Jeanne Castel in 1923. At first, his style was figurative and played on contrasts of light. He expertly harnessed the essence of reality in order to transfigure it, redefining the genres of landscape painting, still lifes and nudes (especially in his series of dark works) during the inter-war period. A few years later, his approach underwent a radical shift and became much more abstract. He launched the “Informalist” art movement, playing with pictorial materials and combining different substances to create visions of an extraordinary material quality. Close to the great intellectual figures of his time, including Jean Paulhan, Paul Éluard, Francis Ponge, René Char and André Malraux, Fautrier never ceased producing remarkably powerful and politically resonant works, as is attested by his major series Otages (1943-1945), Objets (1947-1948) and Partisans (1956). In 1960, he was awarded the first prize for painting at the Venice Biennale. Boasting an exceptionally exhaustive iconography, this first ever comprehensive annotated catalogue of Jean Fautrier’s paintings includes the technique, origin, exhibitions and bibliography for each work. It is supplemented with a detailed biography, technical analyses and authoritative scientific texts, as well as transcriptions of interviews and radio broadcasts from Fautrier’s time.
Text in English and French.