Max Bill, Ugo Rondinone, Meret Oppenheim, John Armleder, and others
Just like its territory, with such diverse landscapes, Swiss art has something indefinable, a je ne sais quoi of trouble and, at the same time, very particular. So, the expression chosen by the new Gagosian gallery to unite the great Swiss artists, Swiss Made, seems to us to be very well chosen.
Far from the postcard imagery of a clean and picturesque Switzerland, the exhibition, following in the footsteps of Harald Szeeman’s Visionary Switzerland in 1992 at the Kunsthaus Zürich, celebrates this ordinary “little madness” and the somewhat iconoclastic and offbeat penchant of Swiss art. From the improbable floating landscapes of Ferdinand Hodler (1858-1918) to the Horror vacui (horror of the void) in the saturated and obsessive spaces of two of the most famous representatives of Art brut: Adolf Wölfli and Aloïse Corbaz. Faces-masks and other Heads in the making, mixing the spot and the line of Paul Klee (around 1920) to the split face of Urs Fischer (2022): a large panel silk-screened on aluminum showing a face with closed eyes framed in close-up, partially masked by the fragment of a second face, the whole immersed in a bath of color/light orange Pop hypnotic: of the art to use the strangeness and to throw suspicion on the images with impunity …
Swiss Made –
From Hodler to Urs Fischer
Gagosian Galerie, Gstaad – Promenade 79, 3780, Switzerland
Until September 17th
https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2022/swiss-made-from-ferdinand-hodler-to-urs-fischer
Stéphanie Dulout