Hannes Schupbach – författare

Hannes Schupbach is a filmmaker, painter, performance artist and curator of film programs. He did his education as an artist at the schools of art and design in Zurich and Basel from 1988-91, and as a visiting student in cinema and performance studies (MA) at New York University. Schupbach is best known for his films, which have been shown in group shows in Switzerland and at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2005). Further events are scheduled at the Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid, Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge MA (April 2009) and the Tate Modern, London (May 2009). Schupbach has also worked extensively in painting, creating large, connected series of paintings, some of them reflecting his interest in music by the American composers John Cage and Morton Feldman. "Hannes Schupbach. Cinema Elements" is the first comprehensive monograph on Schupbach's work, published to accompany Schupbach first large solo show at the Kunsthalle Basel (January-March 2009). The book presents a vast number of large-size film-stills and of his serial paintings.Essays by expert authors and by Schupbach, on the key elements of his work as a film maker, a chronology of his oeuvre and biography and a comprehensive bibliography complete the images.

The Swiss photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt (1914 - 1999) came via London to New York in 1935 from his Swiss home town of Basle and found himself overwhelmed by the American metropolis. "The tremendous difference in scale between the soaring buildings and the people in the street astonished me", he wrote of the city that became his home for the rest of his life. Though comparatively little known, Burckhardt is increasingly being recognized as an outstanding 20th-century photographer. His New York street scenes of the 1940s are classic. In the 1950s, Burckhardt took many portraits of artists for Art News, some of them being his friends - Willem de Kooning, Alex Katz, Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and others. Burckhardt found photography too monumental, "because when it gets printed and comes out a picture it becomes like a fact, you know". He preferred the fleetingness of a film, where "things come and go", and often used the photo and the movie camera simultaneously on his tours around the streets of New York and later the forests of Maine.