Zilla Leutenegger
17 Apr - 07 Aug 2011
© Zilla Leutenegger
Bathroom, 2006
Videoinstallation
Courtesy Sammlung Goetz
Foto: Wilfried Petzi, München
Bathroom, 2006
Videoinstallation
Courtesy Sammlung Goetz
Foto: Wilfried Petzi, München
ZILLA LEUTENEGGER
More than this
In Kooperation mit der Sammlung Goetz
17 April - 7 August, 2011
The Swiss artist Zilla Leutenegger (*1968 in Zurich) combines murals, drawings, objects, and video projections to produce space-consuming installations and light images. Their playful ease takes us by surprise. Several sweeping but succinctly placed lines are often enough for the artist to create her own world. We time and again encounter Leutenegger’s alter ego, the fictional character Zilla, in vaguely suggested spaces. She is the sole protagonist with whom she explores different role patterns and identities. Childhood dreams and the fantastical likewise have a place here, as do completely everyday situations: Zilla playing the piano, working, or just reading a book. It is precisely ostensibly commonplace activities that through the eyes of the artist become perceptual occurrences of a special kind; that are in a position to point beyond the here and now and in doing so shift us into a state of aesthetic experience.
Many of the works come along with irony and subtle visual wit. Others are borne by a dense atmosphere of melancholy that suggests something that is absent. They appear to be snapshots in time without a plot or dramatic composition, and yet they contain a narrative core that tells of life’s existential conditions and possibilities.
The exhibition in Bremen presents installations and drawings from a larger body of work from the Goetz Collection and complements it with numerous recent works, in part being shown in Germany for the first time.
More than this
In Kooperation mit der Sammlung Goetz
17 April - 7 August, 2011
The Swiss artist Zilla Leutenegger (*1968 in Zurich) combines murals, drawings, objects, and video projections to produce space-consuming installations and light images. Their playful ease takes us by surprise. Several sweeping but succinctly placed lines are often enough for the artist to create her own world. We time and again encounter Leutenegger’s alter ego, the fictional character Zilla, in vaguely suggested spaces. She is the sole protagonist with whom she explores different role patterns and identities. Childhood dreams and the fantastical likewise have a place here, as do completely everyday situations: Zilla playing the piano, working, or just reading a book. It is precisely ostensibly commonplace activities that through the eyes of the artist become perceptual occurrences of a special kind; that are in a position to point beyond the here and now and in doing so shift us into a state of aesthetic experience.
Many of the works come along with irony and subtle visual wit. Others are borne by a dense atmosphere of melancholy that suggests something that is absent. They appear to be snapshots in time without a plot or dramatic composition, and yet they contain a narrative core that tells of life’s existential conditions and possibilities.
The exhibition in Bremen presents installations and drawings from a larger body of work from the Goetz Collection and complements it with numerous recent works, in part being shown in Germany for the first time.