Laurence Schmidlin - Böcker

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.

Brigitte Mavromichalis was born in Stockholm in 1926, into a family of higher Swedish society. At the age of 20 she was sent to Switzerland by her parents to pursue an academic education at the University of Lausanne. There she met her future husband, who was of Greek origin. The couple, who loved travelling and culture, kept their Swiss residence but toured the world and visited countless museums. After her husband’s death in 1982, Mavromichalis continued to devote herself to her passion for art, music, and sport, excelled in bridge at an international level, and remained a discreet patron of the arts until her demise in 2015.She put together her art collection, which grew over the decades, in utter freedom and free of any hierarchy in media, style, and people. It consisted mainly of paintings, but also included drawings and prints, and was characterised by great diversity.In 2023, the Musée d’art du Valais in Sion received a bequest of 45 works from Brigitte Mavromichalis’s collection. This book reflects the diversity of this legacy. It portrays the collector and her bequest: all these works are explained by distinguished art historians in concise texts.Text in French and German.