well, in this exhibition i'm showinga lot or very little, depending on how you look at it.i have adapted to the rooms, that means you got a certain spaceand rooms to use, and you can show the works accordingly.and here, because the rooms a quite big, there was the possibility topresent very early works as well as latest works.and what was great is that it allowed me to show my sculptures.this piece is almost readymade, that is, i have an old farmhouse, where over generations people stored all kinds of things. and then i browse things andfind things
and then immediately i realize,i can create a figure out of this thing, this peace for me is great,it's made of bast, a deer, with cords, and thena somehow surreal thing is the result. and then, here for example, thisis a piece that i hardly dared to exhibit.man sometimes you just have to, and it's not important what otherpeople think. it's originally a trowel. as a child, i helped my motherto clean the laundry, and you for that, in the tub,you needed the trowel, it's a leftover from the past.
as we are already looking at the figures:this is profane, it's with nails, there are other artists that work with nails, of course, but for me it's beautiful, an old piece of woodlarge nails, connected with wire, this is what i like, it'smy way to create figures. well, people often ask, how did you become an artist in my case, it was a bit odd. i was, in the beginning, bookseller, i did a bookseller apprenticeship. then i had a antiquarian bookshopin zã¼rich. at that time i did a lot of travels to asia, america, alaska,
the south seas, i travelelled with thetranssiberian railway to japan, and on these travels i suddenly started todraw sketches, instead of taking photos. i painted my memories, and that's howi entered the adventure of art and painting. over the years, i firstwas figurative, and then became more and more abstract. and theni had the urge to create sculptures as well and now i even began to stageperformances with smoke, colored smoke, i created a light installation inan old factory, with 50, 60 or 100 neon tubes, wherewe made a performance,
accompanied by sound.that was absolutely fantastic, i have also filmed it.this is a brand new sculpture, a sculpture that i created this summer.it's made of… inside, there's a cardbord box, coveredwith fleece and then laced up. and this is a piecethat could be cast in bronce but the interesting aspect of it is to show that basically, we are nomadsin this world. again, this reminds me of a suitcase, tied up, packed,and it shows how i like to work. here's a figure, a sculpture
that is made of wood, very simple,wooden wedges that i have found and which i've thenglued onto this wooden base, and thus a very simplesculpture is created. it's again very readymade, as these are just found objects. this piece, for me, is pretty playful, i call this sculpture “the dreamof the seaâ€. i've found this thing in the attic, it's a souvenir that my uncle brought from italy or i don't know where, and then…
the wood is an old beanpole, andthat is a nice combination. and so a piece from an old farmers housein the swiss midlands becomes suddenly “the dream of the seaâ€. this is a series i call metamorphoses. these are huge oil and enamel paintings. well, i don't know what else to say about them. the problem is that one should talktoo much about painting, it should speak for itself. but, sure, it deals withthe seasons or color variations or life situations or impressions,but the main title is
“metamorphosesâ€. and that again has something to do with the ancient times. well, where do you get the ideas.to be honest, every day brings new ideas. because i see art in everything,everywhere. for me, everything can be used to make art. but the mainmotivation for me is ancient art, my ancestors,from picasso, via van gogh via rembrandt, above all the cavemen, which are as modern as anything.so, i get my inspiration from cultural history. i live in asia,half of my time, since 40 years already, so it's nosurprise that i like chinese ink painting,
and so, here i've… very delicately i use feathers, quill feather and ink,chinese ink, here are some variations in small format, on paper, playing around,but which i love a lot. this series, i call them asian impressions, i've found them in a map, some weeks ago, they are more than 30 years old.initially i thought i can't show them, but then after i had a closer look, i said to myself, theyare still a great series. this is intriguing: it's onself-crafted paper and it's
paper from the bark of mulberry treeand the mulberry tree is the tree on which the silk spider grows.this produces unbelievable , connotations, because this kind ofpaper was used by the chinese 4000-5000 years ago already, it's in factthe first paper that existed, you cook it, you scoop it up,and then you put it in the sun. without any chemicals or glueand it work. this my asian relationship again.now here's something special, that i almost didn't dare to show. these are plain calendar sheets,from an animal calendar, painted over
with oil paint, where the wolf shimmers through somehow. also almost a readymade, a bitreworked, but painting, not sculpture. these paintings hereare around 1,20 by 1 meters, i have created them this summer,and i've restricted myself regarding the color, so they are just gray and white,because i tend to use too many colors and the more colors i use,the darker my paintings get. so sometimes i'm happy to make a series that is limited in colorbut still meaningful. looks very wild, but in the fierceness
it's still soothing. and here, for example, there arenewspapers, neue zã¼richer zeitung, overpainted, the stock market report. it's somehowsymptomatic, the wild art confronted with the seriousstock market. and this is an example for a paintingat the end of the day. when i paint there's always some paint left,the leftovers. previously, i've cleaned the brushes, nowadays i always use thelast paint, which then results in another painting, so i'm paintingas much as possible. well, my daily routine: it's likeeveryone else's day, too:
i get up, drink some coffee, read the papers,check the news via computer, but in the night already, alsoin my dreams, i prepare for the day, it's like the cook does,preparing the vegetables, i know exactly, i wantto prime the canvases, mount the canvas, and i do everythingmyself, but by doing it myself, i get a nice warm-up for making art.so the art is present from from morning to night, but the daily schedule gets basically determined already during the night.here's a series that i continue to follow since several years. it's hard to find
nowadays, these are so called decollages,posters from advertising columns, they are almost gone today.you tear down a piece of the poster and glue it on the posteragain, and so on. i love this series, there's more of them, here are just three. this is alfred jarry, around 1880 on a bicycle, he wasthe author of stage plays, king ubu, he is considered today to be the predecessor of the dadaists.he is the forefather of dada. all dadaists refer to alfred jarryund that's why i've loved to create
this work, i've just put himin this picture, on the bike, upside down as well. and a journalisttold me: this painting would be so beautiful, but why ishe upside down! theses are again the new typeof sculptures that i'm working on currently. tied up things, it remindsa bit of christo but the basic idea ist simplypacking, going on a trip, referring to nomadism. this is bit like graffiti. for serious art historians this is marginal, of course, but for me it has great connotations,
i'm calling it “the flight oficarusâ€, who flew too high and his swings melted in the sun and then crashed.these are the wings of icarus. i like to referto ancient mythology, here again. and then these are made of handmade papier,produced by myself, from the mulberry tree, they are monotypes. there is a series of around 20 sheets, i'm exhibiting just the two.with the monotypes you don't paint directly on the sheet, but on a glass plate, for example
and print from that, so there's always some similarity between each sheet. and this is a unique piece from a trilogy,the title is “island rã¼genâ€, that's where my grandmother comes from,she was a shepherd's daughter. she came to switzerland in the 1910s and that's why rã¼gen is still some kind of country of homesickness. i love this picture. as i've alreadytold you, i like to work with readymades, with found objects. and thisis – i hardly dare to say it – from a restaurant in zã¼rich,the restaurant is called helvetia, it's a culture pub, wherei have stealed
these beer coasters and glued themon this piece, just like that. and for me, it's still great.this is a sculpture that was originally meant to be exhibited on the side, but the curator has put it upright, that's also okay. this isjust a rope, a readymade as well, but very ambiguous, frompacking to hanging in the barn. for me it symbolizes a lot of things. it's playing around with found objects, and i love to declare themas art, or make them part of art, because art is notfrom out of this world,
art is part of live.these pictures are made with leftover paint, paintings fromthe end of the day, when you are tired but still continue to produce a piece, and the next day you are happy that you made it, becauseturned out great. and the exciting thing about painting: when the paint is fresh,sometimes the picture looks good, and when the paint has dried,it looks not that good anymore and so i'm always curious how thepainting looks like after 1, 2, or 3 days, when it dries. as i said, sometimes itgets better, sometimes it gets worse. and here, these are works thatare 30 years old,
when i was still smoking, smokingpall mall, i've cut out text from the packaging of the cigarettesand glued them on the pictures as collages, so i call them pall mall-collages. sculpture always has got something to do with architecture.the interesting thing with architecture is: you move into a space, you take theroom into possession. you make an object, that has to be adequateto the space, the room, etc. a painting is always twodimensional, flatand the sculpture, you can view it from all angles and a good sculpture is only good if it looks good from all sides, from above, frombehind, from underneath, etc.
these here are also found objects, from a barn, it's now a purposelesswheel on a purposeless wooden block, but it was an oldtoy stroller, and this statement stimulated me, this statement,or non-statement of this sculpture. and this piece here, it's wood with metal, it was an old door frame. this is again sculpture that's almost an assemblage or real architecture. it's just smallwooden pegs, which i have glued on and painted black,
and declared a sculpture. i was asked by this curatorif i couldn't make my late father a part of the exhibition, gerhard meier.we are celebrating his 100th birthday this year. i said, okay, we will make a small presentation. thisfor example is a bust that i created: gerhard meier at a timehe was still smoking. this bust was made around 1963, made of tin andcopper, and i call it “gerhard meier with mary long cigaretteâ€.here are some books that he wrote, for example, a great title:“bucket palms dream of oasesâ€
which was published in the 1960sat kandelaber publishing house, published in bern, and that was egon ammann, publisher amman from zã¼rich and then berlin,he died recently, he was schoolmate, we went tobookseller school together so this is “bucket palms dream of oasesâ€and then there's another book that's called “paper rosesâ€, and then,the last book is called “whether the garnet trees bloom†and then another beautiful book,“it's raining in by villageâ€, then, from the tetrology, it's called“island of the dead†and the very
beautiful book, “land of the windsâ€,referring to the island rã¼gen. i've put up some photos here, this is a beautiful one, isolde ohlbaum, in the swiss jura,and this is a series, poems by gerhard meier, writtenby hand in original scale, these were poems that i wrote in the typewriter for him, because he couldn't write on the typewriter, only later he learned it a bit,so he just put the poems on my table. and i have kept themand for his 70s birthday, i made some lithographs, sepia-lithographs for him.
these are not one-to-one translations,but paraphrases, they are all landscapes of the swiss jura.it's also interesting that these are so called finger-paintings, that meanswithout brush, just with the hand, the fingertip, directly onto the plate.here's another funny photo: gerhard meier with peter handke, with handke's dogin italy in the year 1989, at the petrarca-prize-giving. hereis gerhard meier again, it's a photo i made, peterhandke with gerhard meier. here's a book with my early works that i printed in thailand in the 1980s
these are all figurative works, a lotof works that i creaded around 1960 this is central switzerland withlake lucerne, these are all figurative paintings, and wheni look at them today, it's nostalgia, of course, and sometimes i say to myself, well it wasn't that bad whati created back then. i always get asked, what areyou going to do in the future. well, live goes on, i takewhat i can, it would be sad if one thing is successful and youwould make that same thing again and again. it's great, when you see new things,and i plan to work more with space,
ground covering, in the landscapeand work with smoke, not fire, but colored smoke, and i have alreadygreat ideas and projects. i would love to go to spitsbergenin the snow, or the antarctic or the amazonas, and do something there. finally, my mikado sculptures.they look like mikado, the japanese game. i arrange them and each time i put them up, theylook different, never the same. here's one in red, there's one in yellow and there
i put up one in blue and one in white. what's interesting about these: theseare sculpture that are not ment for eternity. they fall apartafter two winter seasons. they are made of wood, and you couldcreated them with aluminium, then they would last longer, but the beautiful thing is that youcan create them and put them up with little effort and they are quitestable if you do it right.