| The
Swiss Institute – Contemporary Art is pleased to announce
an exhibition in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the
ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. Curated
by the ETH’s own Paul Tanner, this exhibition, TRACKING
SUBURBIA, presents the work of five important Swiss artists
whose practice has contributed to the tradition in American
photography of documenting the life and architecture of suburbia.
In 1967, the American photographer Bill Owens began taking
pictures of local people in front of and inside their freshly
built suburban houses, as a photographer for the small-town
California paper The Livermore Independent. He often photographed
his subjects on holidays such as Christmas and the Fourth
of July, or at birthday parties. These pictures were published
in the 1972 book Suburbia. Owens had managed to elucidate
a particular aspect of the American way of life: his pictures
have become classic images of the American dream. A number
of Swiss artists have also followed the trail of the suburbs,
this anonymous zone between city and country.
In the early 1970s, Urs Lüthi (born 1947) combined photographs
of houses and apartment buildings with self-portraits, dressed
in full drag. To Lüthi, as for Owens, the interactive
element, a person’s relationship to his or her own house,
was crucial.
Peter Fischli (born 1952) and David Weiss (born 1946) on the
other hand, kept the houses and regions they depicted devoid
of people. In 1992 they published a series of photos, Seidlungen,
Agglomeration, which treated the Swiss suburbs with their
signature frankness and stark humor.
The youngest artist in the exhibition, Boris Rebetez (born
1970), lives in Brussels. In 1992, he created a small series
of ceramic plates. Instead of depicting well-known subjects
one would find on a souvenir, he chose to represent anonymous
buildings found in every suburb.
The painter Jean-Frédéric Schnyder (born 1945),
famous for his half-naïve, half-conceptual series of
images of Swiss freeways, train stations and waiting rooms,
turned to photography in 1999-2000. No doubt inspired by Ed
Ruscha’s 1966 series, Every Building on Sunset Strip,
Schnyder photographed every building on the road between the
towns of Zug and Baar, and, with the help of a computer, strung
these images together into a seamless nearly 14-meter strip
of images.
Tracking
Suburbia is made possible in part from support from the ETH
Zurich, the Consulate General of Switzerland New York and
SWISSPEAKS 05.
In
the Project Space: Do
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