Max Bill, Ugo Rondinone, Meret Oppenheim, John Armleder and others
Like its territory, with its diverse landscapes, Swiss art has something indefinable about it, a je ne sais quoi that's unsettling and at the same time very special. The expression "Swiss made", chosen by the new Gagosian gallery to unite the great Swiss artists, seems to us to be well chosen. Far from the postcard imagery of a clean-cut, picturesque Switzerland, the exhibition, which follows in the wake of Harald Szeemann's "Visionary Switzerland" at Zurich's Kunsthaus in 1992, captures the ordinary "little madness" and somewhat iconoclastic, offbeat bent of Swiss art. From the improbable floating landscapes of Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) to the Horror vacui (horror of emptiness) in the saturated, obsessive spaces of two of the most famous representatives of Art Brut: Adolf Wölfli and Aloïse Corbaz. From Paul Klee's visage-masques and Têtes en devenir ( Heads in the Making) (circa 1920), blending stain and line, to Urs Fischer's split face (2022) - a large screen-printed panel on aluminum showing a face with closed eyes framed in close-up, partially masked by the fragment of a second face, all immersed in a bath of hypnotic pop orange color/light: the art of using strangeness and casting suspicion on images with impunity...
"Swiss made - From Ferdinand Hodler to Urs Fischer" - Gagosian Galerie
Promenade 79, Gstaad (Switzerland)
Until September 17
https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2022/swiss-made-from-ferdinand-hodler-to-urs-fischer
