Bernhard Luginbühl

 

Bernhard Luginbühl (16 February 1929 – 19 February 2011)was a Swiss sculptor.He created iron sculptures in the late 1950s. In 1976 he started with building giant wooden sculptures which he set on fire as an art event.His work featured a variety of materials, including iron, bones, wood and even weapons and industrial waste.After grad­u­at­ing from the School of Applied Arts in Bern (1948), Bernard Lug­in­bühl (*1929) started work­ing in Bern. The artist cre­ated his pieces in a vari­ety of media: wood, stone and pri­mar­ily since 1949, iron. In his lager than life-sized iron sculp­tures a sat­is­fy­ing mon­u­men­tal­ity encoun­ters a cre­ative play­ful­ness deeply rooted in the mate­r­ial. A char­ac­ter­is­tic of Luginbühl’s work is the ten­sion between move­ment and counter-movement, between dynamic ele­ments mov­ing into space and sup­port­ing struc­tures con­trol­ling the movements.“Every little thing has meaning for me,” said Luginbühl on the occasion of his 2003 exhibition at Museum Tinguely in Basel.A park in Bern showcases about 60 of his enormous rusty creations, including animal figures.In addition to sculpture, Luginbühl also produced graphic design, lyric poetry and more fleeting works such as burning things in public as a form of protest.The son of a butcher, the Bern-born Luginbühl remained very down-to-earth despite the critical acclaim he received. 

 

Dieter Roth - Conceptual Art

"Dieter Roth was a German-Swiss Conceptual artist. Best known for his use of biodegradable foodstuffs, he created large-scale installations and sculptures that incorporated cheese, chocolate, and sugar, lending oppressive smells to his exhibitions. Blurring the line between process and product, Roth embraced accidents, mutation, and mutability in his finished works. Born on April 21, 1930 in Hannover, Germany, he gained asylum in Bern, Switzerland during World War II as a teenager. Influenced by formal exercises in design, commercial art, and the works of Paul Klee, Roth employed typography and geometric elements to produced books during the 1950s. Moving to the United States in 1964, Roth taught at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where he famously held classes in which he refused to tell students how to do anything. By the late 1980s, he was major figure in the international art world, representing Switzerland at the 1992 Venice Biennale and, later that same year, the subject of a large-scale retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the later years of his life, he collaborated extensively with his son, Björn Roth, notably including his Solo Szenen (Solo Scenes) (1997–1998), a video installation intimately documenting the last year of the senior Roth’s life as he succumbed to illness. He died on June 5, 1998, in Basel, Switzerland at the age of 68. In 2013, Hauser & Wirth New York held a major exhibition of the artist’s work, focusing on his collaborations with other artists including Richard Hamilton, Emmett Williams, Arnulf Rainer, and Hermann Nitsch. Today, his works are hled in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Hamburger Banhof in Berlin, among others."(.artnet.com)

Eva Aeppli

"Eva Aeppli, born on May 2, 1925 in Zofingen (Switzerland), grew up in Basel with her parents and three siblings. She attended the Steiner School in Basel, which had been co-founded by her father. During the 2nd World War she enrolled in courses at the School of Applied Arts and created her first fabric figures, glove puppets which she sold in various stores. She only commenced her actual artistic oeuvre – she considered the glove puppets her bread-and-butter work – once she was in Paris.After a first marriage to architect Hans Leu, of which her son Felix-Vital was born in 1946, she was soon the partner of Jean Tinguely. She lived with him in the Burghof, a villa scheduled for demolition which was located at the spot where the extension of Basel’s Kunstmuseum is currently taking place. Their daughter Miriam was born in 1950; Aeppli and Tinguely married the year after. 1949 saw the start of Eva Aeppli’s years-long close friendship with Daniel Spoerri, whom Aeppli and Tinguely followed to Paris in 1952. After an initial period in modest hotels they soon moved into a studio in Impasse Ronsin, an artists’ colony in the Quartier Montparnasse, whose doyen was the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi. Here, Eva Aeppli’s oeuvre began with fabric pictures and charcoal drawings, mostly of people, often gaunt figures in gloomy mood.
The subsequent period saw the creation of further groups of heads in fine fabric, which were cast in bronze, Astrologische Aspekte (Astrological Aspects), Die zwölf Sternzeichen (The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac), Einige menschliche Schwächen (Some Human Weaknesses), and a number of others. These are heads whose physiognomies record deeply felt emotions. Despite her reclusiveness, exhibition makers recognized the intensity and quality of her oeuvre and organized major retrospectives: in 1993 the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Pontus Hultén in 1994 at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, André Kamber in the same year at Kunstmuseum Solothurn.
A final group of works was created in 1990 and 1991: these are sculptures that she created jointly with Jean Tinguely, morbid figures such as the Hommage à Käthe Kollwitz (Kunstmuseum Solothurn) or Erika (private collection). These sculptures were on show at Basel’s Galerie Littmann and were central components of the subsequent retrospectives. Eva Aeppli collaborated with other artists, too, such as Jean-Pierre Raynaud or Daniel Spoerri.."(.tinguely.ch/en/)

Dieter Roth

 Born in Hanover of a Swiss father and German mother. Moved to Switzerland 1943. Began to make drawings, oil paintings and prints in various media, and to write poems. Graphic design apprentice at Bern 1947-51. Started in 1954 to make experimental works, including his first baked sculpture, experiments with Op art, first book with holes and first film. Lived from 1955-7 in Copenhagen, then moved to Reykjavik, Iceland. Made kinetic pictures and sculptures, pictures made with half-tone screens, photograms, and had his first one-man exhibition at the Mokka Kaffi, Reykjavik, 1958. Received a William and Noma Copley Foundation Award in 1960. Lived in the USA 1964-7, where he taught at Yale and elsewhere, and began making pictures and objects incorporating chocolate and other edible materials subject to decomposition. Large output of experimental books and prints. Made series of paintings and drawings in collaboration with Richard Hamilton from 1976; has also made prints in collaboration with Hamilton or Arnulf Rainer. Lives in Reykjavik, with visits to Düsseldorf, Berlin, London.( tate.org.uk )