Philip Ursprung – författare

This innovative study of two of the most important artists of the twentieth century links the art practices of Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson in their attempts to test the limits of art - both what it is and where it is. Ursprung provides a sophisticated yet accessible analysis, placing the two artists firmly in the art world of the 1960s as well as in the art historical discourse of the following decades. Although their practices were quite different, they both extended the studio and gallery into desert landscapes, abandoned warehouses, industrial sites, train stations, and other spaces. Ursprung bolsters his argument with substantial archival research and sociological and economic models of expansion and limits.

An essential reference that provides new understanding of the thought processes of one of the most radical artists of the late twentieth century.Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) has never been an easy artist to categorize or to explain. Although trained as an architect, he has been described as a sculptor, a photographer, an organizer of performances, and a writer of manifestos, but he is best known for un-building abandoned structures. In the brief span of his career, from 1968 to his early death in 1978, he created an oeuvre that has made him an enduring cult figure.  In 2002, when Gordon Matta-Clark’s widow, Jane Crawford, put his archive on deposit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, it revealed a new voice in the ongoing discussion of artist/architect Matta-Clark’s work: his own. Gwendolyn Owens and Philip Ursprung’s careful selection and ordering of letters, interviews, statements, and the now-famous art cards from the CCA as well as other sources deepens our understanding of one of the most original thinkers of his generation. Gordon Matta-Clark: An Archival Sourcebook creates a multidimensional portrait that provides an opportunity for readers to explore and enjoy the complexity and contradiction that was Gordon Matta-Clark.

Daniela Keiser ranks among the most renowned contemporary artists in Switzerland. In 2017 she was awarded the Prix Meret Oppenheim as well as a studio grant from Landis & Gyr Stiftung that enabled her to embark on an extended stay in London’s East End. There she discovered the Idea Store, the public library on Whitechapel Road built by British architect David Adjaye in 2001–05. Upon its opening to the public, this institution quickly became a meeting place for a broad spectrum of society including for socially disadvantaged people. The goal of the Idea Stores - eight of them have so far been opened in various London boroughs - is to enhance formerly neglected neighbourhoods and offer a low-threshold source of education and information.From that initial Idea Store on Whitechapel Road, Daniela Keiser began to take pictures of the goings-on in the street outside. Her Library - Idea Store series reveals a calm, repetitive but insistent image of the city and offers insight into the small everyday variations of the surrounding world. Her photographic reflection is accompanied by a conversation between David Adjaye and art and architecture historian Philip Ursprung. They talk about Keiser’s perception of the site and - without actually showing the building - the impact of urban design and the architect’s intentions.

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.

Hans Danuser is among the foremost contemporary Swiss photographic artists. He has gained particular recognition for his art projects in collaboration with architects and for his architectural photography. His work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions and is represented in public collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. His photographs of buildings by the celebrated Swiss architect Peter Zumthor ignited a lively debate on buildings, images and history when they were first shown twenty years ago and have since made their way around the world in magazines and books. They were the result of a carte blanche Zumthor had offered to Danuser: an artist's radically subjective look at the work of another artist representing a different discipline.Seeing Zumthor - Images by Hans Danuser presents a selection of Danuser's Zumthor-pictures. An accompanying essay investigates the effect of Danuser's work on the photographic depiction of architecture, and in a discussion Hans Danuser explains the idea and concept behind his images of Zumthor's buildings.Text in English and German.

Having represented Beuys, Richter and Polke with his gallery and having curated eminent exhibitions and biennials, Rene Block ranks among the central figures of the neo-avant-garde. This publication brings together writings by and interviews with Block, which usually came about on the occasion of exhibition projects.

The book explores the term of «interartistic phenomenon» that Vassilena Kolarova introduces in the semiotic field of intermedial researches. The writer manifests the existence of the interartistic phenomenon which expresses the relation arising between arts at the time of an aesthetic perception of a work of art. Her concept of interartistic phenomenon differs from intertextuality since it affects arts. The semiotic analysis is concentrated on the works of Michel de Montaigne focusing the research on his famous «Essays» and «The Diary of Montaigne’s Travels». The aim of the research is to study the work of Montaigne as a work of art in first place. The varieties of the «interartistic phenomenon» which exist in the work of Montaigne are analyzed in light of the artistic vocabulary he is using to qualify his work. The author of the book takes notice of the interartistic conception in the work of Montaigne revealed by the convergence of nature and art, particularly in the diary of Montaigne’s travels. Here the author studies the interartistic phenomenon in the context of the Renaissance and its evolution from ancient philosophy (Horace – Ut pictura poesis, Philostrate – ekphrasis) through Renaissance (Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone) to modern ideas whereas the research is done from a theoretical point of view.