Commencing his career in the 1950s as a self-taught photographer working primarily for the gay underground Zurich club and magazine Der Kreis, Karlheinz Weinberger (1921–2006) took candid shots of lovers, friends and strangers on the street with an overt erotic investment in his subjects. He soon developed a fixation with the working-class youth culture known as the “Halbstark” (or “half strong”). Its members demonstrated their anti-establishment stance with embellished outfits of denim and leather, in an exaggerated and homemade version of the popularized American bad-boy style of the time. In his stark, posed photographs of these young rebels, Weinberger focuses on individual figures, exploring both a personal erotic obsession and the cultural symbolism of blue jeans, whose scarcity in post war Switzerland implied not just a fashion statement but a badge of pride. This publication reproduces a rare portfolio of these works that Weinberger designed himself in the mid-1950s.

Karlheinz Weinberger: Jeans (SWISS INSTITUTE)

Arts & Photography

Jetzer, Gianni

Photography & Video

Swiss Institute/Presentation House Gallery/Museum Gegenwartskunst/Bywater Bros

Separately renowned in their respective mediums of film and painting, Harmony Korine and Rita Ackermann meet in their mutual affection for unorthodox, mischievous beauty, and more specifically in the creation of psychologically jarring figures amplified through fragmented narratives. Shadowfux documents the artists' first collaboration. Taking Korine's recent film Trash Humpers (2009) as its point of departure, it features large-scale works in which Ackermann and Korine have collaged, painted and drawn over stills of the film's beguiling young bodies with old faces. Generated through a call-and-response method, Shadowfux illustrates the importance of cutting to both artists' works. Additionally, it presents short texts by Korine, as well as previously unpublished deleted scenes from Trash Humpers. Accompanying the artists' works are short illustrative texts by exhibition curator Gianni Jetzer, curators Richard Flood and Piper Marshall, and critics Antoine Catala and Cameron Shaw.

Rita Ackermann & Harmony Korine: Shadowfux

Flood, Richard

Shaw, Cameron

CATALA ANTOINE

Marshall, Piper

Individual Artists

Swiss Institute/Agnès b.

Olaf Breuning - Ugly. (German Edition)

Doswald, Christoph

Strauss, Dorothea

Stegmann, Markus

Hatje Cantz Verlag

In a New York Times review, Roberta Smith wrote that Shirana Shahbazi “treats her photographs like words that can be used in different sentences or translated into entirely different languages.” Shahbazi--who won the London Citibank Prize in 2002 and participated in the 2005 Venice Biennale--was born in Tehran in 1974, moved to Germany as a child and is currently based in Zurich. Her work reflects the references she has absorbed from both Iranian and European cultures. Trained as a photographer, Shahbazi shoots eclectically--portraits, still lifes, landscapes. These photographs are then often used as source material for paintings, billboards and traditional Iranian carpets. By altering the scale of the photographs, transposing the imagery into a new medium and blending cultures, she subverts viewers' expectations about the relationship between an artist's identity and her work. Lavishly illustrated, this monograph includes essays by Kate Bush, Ali Subotnick and Gianni Jetzer.

Shirana Shahbazi: Meanwhile

Subotnick, Ali

Bush, Kate

JRP|Ringier

This publication presents an overview of the work of the Swiss artist duo Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann (L/B), who have been collaborating since 1993 and have regularly exhibited in biennials, museums and art venues around the world. Their work can be described as riding on the edge of art, architecture and design. Designed by the Zurich-based design firm Norm, this volume divides L/B's work into seven thematic groups by chapter: Mobile (containing movable objects, among them the one-room hotel "Everland"), Comfort (inflatable objects), Perfect (modular objects), Surface (sharp-edged paintings), Flat (wall paintings), Space (stage objects) and Field (interventions in the real world). Each thematic chapter is introduced by a noted writer; they include, in order, Marc-Olivier Wahler, Philip Ursprung, Giovanni Carmine, Jacqueline Burckhardt, Diedrich Diederichsen, Gianni Jetzer and Rein Wolfs.

L/B: Beautiful Book

Diederichsen, Diedrich

Wahler, Marc-Olivier

Burckhardt, Jacqueline

Ursprung, Philip

Carmine, Giovanni

Wolfs, Rein

Saskia Olde Wolbers has a taste for stories in which the characters become victims of their own imaginations, unable to tell dream from reality. In her videos, detached voice-overs recount the unlikely dramas of her protagonists; abstract visuals look like digital dreamscapes but are in fact meticulously built miniature film sets.

Saskia Olde Wolbers: Now That Part Of Me Has Become Fiction

Ellis, Patricia

Artimo

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jetzer, Gianni. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Jetzer, Gianni