Helen Hirsch – författare

“We dive into Gerber’s worlds to lose ourselves and to find ourselves again in amazing places.” This is how the Swiss art historian and acclaimed novelist Paul Nizon characterised the work of his compatriot, the painter Theo Gerber (1928–1997). Gerber was a free spirit who has remained largely unknown in his native country until the present day. This is due to the artist’s own choice, having rejected the efforts of gallery owners to introduce his works to the general public. For Gerber, success did not mean fame and glory, but rather that his art showed a different possibility from that of his contemporaries. The way in which Gerber, who roamed between a variety of styles, travelled the world, and lived with the ethnic group of the Dogon in West Africa for two years during a creative crisis, upheld his artistic freedom makes it impossible to assign him to a specific direction in 20th-century art.This book, published to coincide with a retrospective exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland, is an overdue tribute to this, in the best sense of the word, incomprehensible artist and finally provides the general public with a chance to discover and recognise his oeuvre.Text in English and German.

Marguerite Saegesser (1922–2011) achieved fame in the US, her adopted country for many years, where her prints and paintings were repeatedly shown in group and solo exhibitions in California and New York over a period of two decades. In her native Switzerland, however, the artist and her multifaceted oeuvre are yet to be discovered.This book fills this gap, featuring Saegesser’s art with a special focus on the monotype, a printing technique developed in the 17th century and producing only a single original at a time. It also demonstrates how Saegesser, who initially studied sculpture in Lausanne, found her artistic destiny in America. Key to her evolution was San Francisco’s lively art scene of the late 1970s, and in particular the painter Sam Francis, an outstanding representative of action painting and abstract expressionism, who became her friend and precursor. His fascination with the monotype quickly transferred to Saegesser, who soon achieved mastery in it and made a significant contribution to the revival of the historic technique.Text in English and German.

Transboundary – Exposing the Porosity of the Concept of National Borders Reena Saini Kallat’s practice evolves around the tension between the concept of barriers in a world fundamentally shaped by mobility and interaction. Exploring the divisive narratives around national and geopolitical borders and their impact on identity and self-image for people and their immediate environment, she is also concerned with social and psychological barriers. That barriers give way, and can be subverted, is an idea that is pronounced in Kallat’s work using electric cables twisted to resemble barbed wire. She uses the paradox of the existence of technology for free flow of information and restriction on movement. In order to expose the ambiguity of national narratives, the figure of the hybrid has come to hold symbolic potential in her practice, as a truant against dividing lines: Kallat creates hybrids of animals and plants that are strongly associated with national identity, only to show that nature defies the violent cleaving through land and nature, and uses the motif of the river, which is often both, border and lifeline to both sides. Kallat’s work reveals the idea of isolation as an illusion, and instead suggests to embrace a pluralism of cultures.

Intense visual experiencesIn her paintings, Rebekka Steiger takes us into strange and colorful dream worlds. Sometimes flowery, sometimes eerie, her paintings are characterized by the dialectic of statics and movement. Steiger's pictures show landscapes, trees, and figures, which she combines into unfinished stories that are sometimes reminiscent of myths and legends. Drawing-like brushstrokes and painterly gestures are superimposed on her canvases to create colorful, dense compositions. The artist's first comprehensive monograph entitled Bingfeng is being published to coincide with the exhibition at Kunstmuseum Thun. With a foreword by Helen Hirsch and essays by Claudia Jolles, Patricia Bieder, Sophia Remer, Peter Stohler, Chiara Ottavi and texts by the artist.

The Bauhaus master Johannes Ittenis one of the prominent protagonists of early Modernism in twentieth-century art. Few people are aware of the close links between his beginnings as an artist and his experience of landscape and nature in the town of Thun and Lake Thun. Johannes Itten gained decisive impulses for the development of his concept of art and his path towards abstraction through various stations and sojourns in Thun and its surroundings. By means of examples of the representations of nature in his early work the publication shows in scholarly depth how Itten discovered his own, very personal and later internationally famous approach to art and painting style and presents his pictorial transformation of natureextending through to the artist’s late works.

At the centre of René Myrha’s (*1939) expressive oeuvre lie landscapes and rigorous compositional room perspectives which are transformed into stage-like settings. They form the scenery for the choreography of his figures. Myrha examines them through specific media in drawings, oil, acrylic, sculpture and reliefs.Born in Delsberg in Switzerland, the painter encountered the contemporary movements of art and design during the 1960s in Paris and Milan. In the foreground of his activities lie forms and volumes which combine and breakthrough constructed and organically created spaces. In his later works they are animated by a surreal figural universe. The publication shows a representative cross-section of Myrha‘s oeuvre, from Pop Art to an obsessive preoccupation with a mysterious and dramatic world of figures.

Clear the ring: The motif of the circus in contemporary art. The circus presents a deliberate staging of attractive illusions, hard struggle, success and failure as part of human existence. The volume assembles works by international contemporary artists who make use of the motif of the circus in order to examine current social circumstances and to question cultural and political structures. The circus originated in London towards the end of the 18th century and has long been a subject of fascination. Today this place of sensuous experiences seems like a relic from the past. The circus is a cosmos which with its entertaining and humorous as well as dark sides provides the basis for an examination of art, cultural history, animal ethics, feminism and racial criticism and also for the exposure of structures of cultural dominance, marginalisation and political and historical filters. ARTISTS: Kathryn Andrews | Miriam Bäckström | Istvan Balogh | Beni Bischof | Mona Boschàr | Barbara Breitenfellner | Michael Dannenmann | Zilla Leutenegger | Dieter Meier | Yves Netzhammer | Tal R | Augustin Rebetez | Boris Rebetez | Ugo Rondinone | Niklaus Rüegg | Francisco Sierra | Norbert Tadeusz | William Wegman et. al.

Gunta Stölzl (1897–1983) and the Swiss artist Johannes Itten (1888–1967) were Bauhaus teachers who met in the experimental field at important stages of their biographies from their time at the Bauhaus in Weimar until well into the 1960s. This volume assembles in picturesque detail their impressive contributions to the art of textile design.Few people are aware that the prominent Swiss Bauhaus master Johannes Itten made an in-depth study of textile design. Accordingly, this publication invites readers to rediscover him as a textile designer in conjunction with the Bauhaus teacher Gunta Stölzl, who has a place in art history as a “classic of textile art”. Both artists left Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Not only did they revive textile art in Switzerland with new ways of inventing forms and ornamentation; they also established a network of modern Swiss textile art.

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.Published to accompany exhibitions at Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg, Germany from October 2018 to January 2019. at the Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland from February to May 2019, and at LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, Austria from June to August 2019.Text in English and German.