Briefing

I regard all of my artistic work as an ongoing project. My object is to always allow several planes to be present at the same time although I also place importance on the abillity of each work to be experienced on one of these planes.

• The individual levels of existence divide into:
• inorganic, earthly, material
• vital, temporal
• social, emotional
• spiritual, principle-based, meditative

Oil on canvas

The theme of my painting is colour.

I avoid everything representational: the colours emerge in such a dynamic
relationship and produce a direct effect on the viewer. Colours are universal realities whose expression and effect unfold when they are relieved of their merely decorative use in pictorial representation. In my pictures I allow them to engage in vivid communication.

I believe that anyone, who calmly studies my pictures with the same stance that I adopt when painting a work,  can trace the thought back in the opposite direction. In this way, and not through an explanatory title, will the viewer understand the impulse of my work.

• I deal with colours in such a way that they become alive.
• Colour is language.
• Colours are not illustrative, not additive, not a means to an end, but autonomous.

Works on Paper – mixed media

In the examination of surface structures colours are used only sparingly, and I limit myself almost exclusively to warm earth-tones. Through the use of earth pigments and organic materials natural structures emerge. These more peaceful pictures have a meditative character. They can be perceived as inner landscapes and they require concentration.

Photographic works

On my travels, which have taken me through the various countries of Europe, I have trained my eye for each country’s special characteristics, of which I draw sketches. Such studies with pencil and paper focus and intensify one’s vision by directing attention to the connections, things which escape the quick casual glance.

Some years ago I discovered in photography a medium through which I can represent not just aspects of the outer visible world. In my photographic works I occupy myself, amongst other things, with the portrayal of various structures.

Through form and structure original principles become visible and thereby the particular characteristics, both great and small, of any one place, can be seen.

In another work, the 1997 series per amore o per forza, I dealt with the problem of child abuse. Here I used concrete symbols – boot, doll, skull – in aesthetic compositions whose very outer harmony creates a deeply moving effect.

Video

My particular interest in the technical possibilities of video is in representing the emotions. In this area, too, I work through reduction to raise awareness. I am not concerned to tell stories in the style of narrative films. I seek rather beyond each subject a non-narrative form of presentation for each known human or inter-human feeling.

The thirty-minute film Two gender monologue, for example, shows a mouth in close-up, and wth it – but not synchronically – a recorded voice speaks familiar sentences from everyday relationships.

Installations

In the area of installations, which have been conceptualized together with Thomas Kutzli, the emphasis lies in the symbiosis of various forms of expression.

For example, concrete symbols are placed in relation to single words, or poetry resonates where one doesn’t expect to find it. We work up concepts both for internal spaces and for public places.

Performance/Action

I work together with Thomas Kutzli in this field as well. In these works the spoken word plays a large role – language is alienated, robbed of its cliches (for example, love poetry of Buhkutzli declaimed with megaphone). In addition, tape recordings of multi-layered word and sound montage, which stand in a tense relationship with
the particular theme, are inserted into sentences spoken live.

In terms of content these works aim through actions and words to draw the observer away from the foundation of his well-worn viewpoint and to generate new ways of thinking.

Paper works

My collaboration with Thomas Kutzli has given rise to autograph paintings, in which poetry/words/sentences are brought into the picture. What the author writes is part of the picture, and in shaping it I grasp the structure and form of the writing, to

allow them to flow into the picture without any hint of illustration.