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Statement Swiss Art

Statement Swiss Art

  • The next Statament Swiss Art will take place  in 2024. The call for tenders will start in February 2024

After it’s successful launch in 2016, this years Statement Swiss Art will be curated by Peter Fischer, independent curator and former director of the Kunstmuseum Luzern and the Zentrum Paul Klee.

The statement-presentation of the Kunst 17 Zürich questions the label ‘Swiss art’: is ‘Swissness’ in art apparent in a specific iconography? In references to a cultural tradition of the country? In the expression of a national identity, of whatever kind?

Interestingly, the title of the show, «Expeditions into the Interior of the Country», does not reflect the criteria established for the selection of the works, but only imposed itself, so to speak, retrospectively, after a critical viewing of the selected works. It conveys the fact that artists are inspired by a specifically Swiss environment as well as by a culture shaped by both that and by history. Apart from an interest in the sublime landscape, the fascination with the incidental is also repeatedly manifested, so that aesthetic stimuli are wrought from unspectacular subjects. Things seldom remain superficial. The ‘Expeditions into the Interior of the Country’ reveal ambivalences and lead to reflections which – sometimes subtle, sometimes untranslatable – connect our supposedly intact world with unsettling global challenges.

The curator complemented them with individual works from company collections and directly from artists. The 50 or so exhibits and installations in media are being shown in the 750 m2 central hall of the fair.