Beat Stutzer – författare

In recent years, Swiss artist Franz Bucher, born in 1940, has produced an extensive series of paintings which he simply titles Fields: lavender, dandelion, rapeseed, and poppy fields congruent with the canvas to form a pictorial field. Yet Bucher’s objective is not primarily the pictorial. Rather, it is more about the two-dimensional space which is given an inherent structure by the largely monochromatic primary colours he uses, as well as his dynamic brushstroke. It becomes apparent that most of the artist’s oeuvre since the early 1970s has been determined by the metrical rhythm in his use of colour. Bucher’s paintings constitute actual energy fields.This new monograph offers a retrospective of Bucher’s entire body of work from the vantage point of his recent pictorial fields. It thus illustrates his true artistic intentions independently of the context of his chosen motifs.Text in English and German.

Swiss surrealist artist HR Giger (1940–2014) achieved international fame in 1979 for designing the fantastic creatures and eerie environments that terrified moviegoers in Ridley Scott’s science fiction film Alien. Yet before these iconic creations made him a celebrity and won him an Oscar for visual effects, Giger was already highly regarded in the international art world for his unique freehand painting style and biomechanical dreamscapes.HR Giger: The Oeuvre Before Alien 1961–1976, first published in 2007 and now becoming available again in a new edition, is the only book to date to document the artist’s lesser known, but no less impressive, early work. This lavishly illustrated volume traces Giger’s career from his education as an architect and industrial designer at the Zurich College of Art to the development of his ink drawing and oil painting technique and his eventual breakthrough as one of the foremost artists of the fantastic realism school. Featuring many unpublished or rarely available early paintings and drawings, and accompanied by an essay by noted art historian Beat Stutzer, this volume juxtaposes Giger’s paintings with works by his predecessors, including Ensor, Fuseli, Goya, and Piranesi.HR Giger: The Oeuvre Before Alien illuminates the mind of a visual genius whose first artistic experiments were decades ahead of their time.

From the outset of her career, Swiss artist Ladina Gaudenz, born in 1962, has been dealing with the close yet fragile relationships between mankind and nature, the environment, and technology. She explores facets and states of these relationships via convincing creative means, resulting in sensual, densely atmospheric paintings, while the boundaries between individual memory, references to tradition, and social commitment remain fluid.This bilingual French–German book is the first comprehensive survey of Ladina Gaudenz’s work of more than three decades. While painting is at its core, she has also created drawings, murals, and installations. Five essays by Françoise Jaunin, writer and art critic, Rainer Michael Mason, scholar of art history, Seraina Peer, art historian and researcher, Karine Tissot, art historian and educator, and the book’s editor Beat Stutzer discuss the evolution of Gaudenz’s artistic themes, the techniques she employs, her public displays, and the reception of her oeuvre as a whole, placing it in the context of contemporary Swiss art.Text in French and German.

With his wood, metal and stone sculptures, Kurt Sigrist (*1943) is one of the most important Swiss artists of the post-war period. After studying at the Lucerne School of Applied Arts (1960–1965) and at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (until 1967), he developed his own work. In 1993 he was awarded the Central Swiss Culture Prize; his works are represented in many museum collections.The first monograph since 1995 was edited by the former director of the Chur Art Museum, Beat Stutzer, and contains numerous, previously unpublished colour and black and white images. The book documents the over 40 works that Sigrist created for public sacred and profane spaces between 1970 and 2010. Juxtaposed with the works he created freely at the same time, they show his entire work in a new light.

In 2009, the Bundner Kunstmuseum Chur in Switzerland purchased a hardly known collection of photographs of and drawings by Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966). It comprised highly revealing and in its vast majority previously unpublished material of great interest. The photographs were taken by various photographers, including celebrated artists such as May Ray, Henri Cartier Bresson and Cecil Beaton. They show Giacometti as a young artist bursting with energy during his first stay in Paris and at work at his legendary studios in Paris and his native Val Bregaglia in Switzerland; lighthearted in company of his wife Annette or in discussion with friends; posing with his sculptures and in silent dialogue with his models. Others allow glimpses into the deserted studio or show Giacometti's works. The drawings are mainly sketches on pages of newspapers and magazines. The entire collection adds new aspects and surprising facets to our idea of the artist and person Alberto Giacometti. 'The Unseen Giacometti' documents this treasure with 160 illustrations, comments and essays on selected aspects.