Zehn Jahre

It has already been ten years since Céline Lange and Stefano Pult opened their gallery space in Zürich’s Löwenbräu area. This anniversary calls for a celebration: a large group exhibition uniting all the artists of the gallery. The survey show concisely portrays the program of lange + pult, which concentrates on contemporary positions from Minimal Art, Radical Painting, New Pop, and Geometric Abstraction. A mission report so to speak, from an undertaking that can look back on ten successful years, but is far from finished.

With Ben Vautier, Olivier Mosset, and Christian Herdeg, three artists of a meanwhile older generation are part of the exhibition, all of them pioneers in their own field. Throughout his carreer, Olivier Mosset („Untitled,“ 2017) has examined the possibilities of painting, not least as one of the founding figures of Radical Painting, banning the motif from the canvas and concentrating on the elementary conditions of painting itself. Christian Herdeg („Flower,“ 2016) is the first Swiss artist to consequently work with neon and argon light. An important member of Fluxus, Ben Vautier is best known for his unmistakable „Ecritures“. In these text-paintings, he serenely addresses (art-)philosophical matters of fact. His „Fou rire“ (2008) can also be read as a bond for the exhibition itself – many of the artists shown work with text, and there are plenty of works with an ironical or uncanny subtext, such as Donato Amstutz’s embroideries, Christian Robert Tissot’s succinct „Spam“ (2017), or Delphine Reists „Mitarbeiter denken positiv“ (2017).

Pop and Minimal Art as well as American car culture are important reference points for Blair Thurman’s shaped canvases („Beeswax Honey Child,“ 2014). Francisco da Matas „Mirrors“ (2017) are collages assembled from disparate elements such as pieces of photographs, painted canvas and eyelets. The borderline between object and painting becomes blurred in these works, as it does in Sergio Sister’s painted boxes („Caixas,“ 2017) or Wolfram Ullrich’s three-part work „Orbit Acrux“ (2017), which turns into the trompe-l’oeil of a constellation of stars on the wall. Gerold Miller creates both objects and paintings („Sets,“ 2017, „Verstärker,“ 2016), as does Mathieu Mercier, whose wallpainting with clock („Ten Clocks for Ten Years,“ 2017) refers directly to the gallery’s anniversary – in an exhibition that is overall full of references to be found and discoveries to be made.