OUR ARTISTS
OUR ARTISTS
In the interconnected landscape of the global art market, our role is to guide the artists we collaborate with as they navigate relationships with galleries, collections, and institutions. Serving as their strategic allies, we prioritize their long-term success and objectives, leveraging our expertise and network to connect them with key figures in the art industry. Through in-depth discussions about their ambitions and a thorough analysis of their career trajectory, we develop a roadmap for their future steps. Continuously seeking out opportunities and potential collaborators, we aim to actualize their upcoming milestones, focusing on long-term and sustainable collaborations.
We work with artists based not only in Switzerland, but also Germany, the USA, Hungary, Kosovo and Japan. The artists we work with have had exhibitions at the Ithra Center in Saudi Arabia, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Kebes Institute in Hungary, Museo del Vetro in Murano, Italy and and the Mobiliar Art Collection, to name a few.
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The singular practice of the artists who we work with, are distinguished through their unique and radical creative path, and can be summarized under the concept of “Mark Making”. Each artist has strongly developed their own artistic process and vision, and for us is therefore a pioneer in their field – through the materiality of their works, the concept of the visual language. Their gestures of inscribing meaning, the deep and intrinsic human desire of creatively appropriating the surrounding lifeworld by leaving a record of ‘being-there’ in an otherwise fleeting time-space. Their individual mark on these grounds become a trace, a signifier, a vestige on the canvas of a shared existence.
We carefully analyze the uniqueness of the artists. In addition, it is essential to the intense collaborative journey we embark on that we can build a relationship based on trust, reliability and an emphasis on working hard, just as we are, to ensure that we both work toward the goals we set.
We are captivated by intriguing narratives rooted in artistic backgrounds and the presence of a compelling story to convey. Rather than fixating on a singular materiality, we acknowledge the potency of diverse techniques and the enriching dialogue they foster. The artists with whom we collaborate with have unique origin stories to how they came to create art, and service a wide range of interest and audiences. Through these unparalleled backgrounds, a wide range of art institutions and galleries can be interested to display the wide array of work, that ranges from 2-dimensional art to performance, sculptural, and interactive projects as well.
Mid-Career Artists
Simon Berger
lives and works in Niederönz, Switzerland
Having devised a revolutionary technique of working glass, Simon Berger proposes a new portraiture in his medium of choice by carving images of great allure from the depth of his vitreous canvases. Against traditional modes of sculpting in three-dimensional ways, his is a ‘painterly‘ gesture that harnesses the affordances of the brittle material in a reversal of long-standing modi operandi. Through bold strokes of a hammer on the glass surface, Simon Berger turns the destructive force of his tool into an amplifier of effects as the resultant cracks and creases form into faces whose piercing expression resonates with the impactful process of ‘morphogenesis‘ as the artist himself refers to his creative ordeal. A sort of anti-creation that speaks to a unique artistic vision Simon Berger has refined over the course of years.
Contrary to expectations of how glass should be handled, Simon Berger exploits its fragility and transparence, constantly pushing its limits against the physical laws of the material - a demonstration of the improbable which ultimately allows for beauty to emerge. Creative intuition, technical skill and continuous innovation characterise Simon Berger‘s practice which probes the expressive capabilities of an inert material commonly destined for factories. His vitreous paintings challenge habits of seeing as the glass canvases become sites where visual perception is held inconstant suspense by the deconstructing and reconstructing image. Glass, the most capricious of all media for artistic expression, acts as a place where the force of a unique sculptural gesture translates into depictions of mesmerising appeal. Of exceptional photorealistic allure, these portraits enthral for their expressiveness, as if animated from within and resonating with life.
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“Human faces have always fascinated me“ - Simon Berger asserts. It is this fascination with the face - the canvas of the soul - that lies at the heart of his artistic research which he translates into mesmerising portraits of great allure. Their power thereby resides not only in the expressive force of the sitter‘s eyes but moreover the artist’s material of choice. Glass, one of the hitherto undervalued media for creative endeavours, serves iwith its rich semantics as a starting point for a portraiture of unprecedented kind. The cracks and creases Simon Berger drives into the surface of his vitreous material resonate with the force of powerful incursion, thereby creating an echo that reverberates through the final image he carves and utlimately liberates from the depth of the glass pane. In its dichotomous nature - liquid and solid, transparent and opaque, fragile and strong - glass acts as an animated support for a new hyperrealistic portraiture. A material that lends itself to a double modality of being looked both at and through, it affords a subtle play with and allusion to the innumerable facets that constitute the human psyche and mind. Deemed one of the greatest - for impenetrable and hence unresolved - mysteries, the human condition is revealed in its fragile strength through the artist who virtuously exploits the transparency of the glass pane by daring a glance ‘beyond painting‘. The human face, the most elaborate of all masks, emerges inadvertently in a form of anti-creation, coming into being through the shattering stroke of Simon Berger‘s bold artistic gesture. By this revolutionary creative act, modes of seeing and perceiving are questioned as the image constantly hovers between disintegration and reconstitution, intrinsically bound to the viewer‘s perspective. The perceptual challenge Simon Berger confronts the beholder with proves integral to his work, a reversal of common habits of looking rooted in a tradition of the ‘static‘ picture. Instead, his are portraits whose dynamic nature speaks to an aesthetic phenomenology in the perception of art that lives by the concrete, physical experience of the glass canvas. “The artwork is present“, the (new) adage goes. A presence whose seductive force intimately ties beholder to beheld as the vitreous surface turns into a mirror for the viewer to project themselves.
Text by Sandrine Welte
Jakup Ferri
lives and works in Prishtina, Kosovo & Amsterdam, Netherlands
Jakup Ferri is a contemporary artist and professor at the Art Academy of Prishtina and guest advisor at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He studied at the Art Academy of Prishtina and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. In 2006, he received the prestigious prize Art Prize of Europe's Future from the Society for Contemporary Art (GfZK) Leipzig. In 2008 he received the Buning Brongers Award in Amsterdam and in 2003 the Muslim Mulliqi Prize and the Artists of Tomorrow Award. 2020 Gjelosh Gjokaj Prize.
He has been artist-in-residence at numerous places, including the International Studio and Curatorial Program New York, Kultur Kontakt Austria. In addition to private collections, his work is also part of the collection of the Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest. Ferris' works have been shown at numerous international exhibitions (solo and group) in museums and galleries, festivals and biennials, including the Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennale, Prague Biennale, Cetinje Biennale, Manifesta Biennale, Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Art, etc.
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Jakup Ferri zooms in to the details of everyday life, shifting our focus away from “big” topics to create an imaginary world inspired by the immediacy of life, both in intimate and collective spaces. The artworks that emerge in various media from paintings to drawings, paper mosaics, embroideries, carpets and videos are vibrant with detail, with the “small” and the common—the places that life explodes, despite the surrounding capitalist destruction and crisis. Humans, creatures and animals catch sunrays and rain drops, play music, dance, perform acrobatics, rest and regenerate. In between the lines, a different world is imagined.
Ferri’s vivid portrayals of city life and leisure connect to folk elements and rituals where the urban space merges with nature, and where humans and animals act as equals, like in cartoons and comics or indigenous and vernacular imagery. The artist highlights the abundant power of everyday human experience as a survival strategy. His work shows the joyful sides of life, even when circumstances take a turn for the worse (as in post-war societies, transition or migration). The witty and humorous messages conveyed sometimes point to the absurd and other times to surreal aspects of life. Representation (of success and wealth) is rendered irrelevant, as animals watch TV, fantastical creatures partake in community festivities, and, generally, when life is a beach. However, these are not frivolous and playful performances of a privileged artist. They are a clear no – a rejection of the state of things.
Many of Jakup Ferri’s drawings, paintings and embroideries depart from his experiences in life, intimate moments of being a family, creating a safe home, observations of public space, reflections on accessible housing especially in the “West”, working with students, transformations of space due to the pandemic, but also from his fascination and care for animals. Human and human-animal relations are sometimes conceptualized as a network of gazes that offer hints for storytelling in his works. Furthermore, performing arts are a recurring motif. Staging becomes a painterly practice of setting up a scene and its performers within the painting.
(Text by Ivana Marjanović, Catalogue, The Monumentality of the Everyday, La Biennale di Venezia, Kosovo Pavillon)
Tobias Gutmann
lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland
Tobias Gutmann, born in 1987 in Wewak, Papua New Guinea, completed his Master of Fine Arts in Storytelling in 2014 at the Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm and a Master in Fine Arts from the ZHdK in Zurich. After receiving his BA in Visual Communication in 2011, he lived in Tanzania for 8 months as part of a community service assignment. Today he lives and works as a freelance artist in Zurich or travels around the world with his project "Face-o-mat". Tobias Gutmann has developed his own language and meaning in the creation of his art. He experiments with different media such as drawings, illustrations, installations, performances, animations, publications and workshops. His works release narratives and include figurative, abstract forms.
Tobias has been nominated for the Swiss Design Awards 2022.
Martina Morger
lives and works in Balzers, Principality of Liechtenstein
Martina Morger's artistic practice interweaves cybernetics and corporeality in situational installations and site-specific performances. The central questions she explores in this way deal with individual freedom in increasingly technological lifeworlds as well as ideas of power, desire, and care within a neoliberal society determined by work and performance. She repeatedly places a specific focus on the role of FLINTA and constructions of gender. Her works can be understood on the one hand as positionings within the existing system and on the other hand as assertions against that very system: Martina actively occupies spaces and negotiates the effects of social constraints on our bodies through strategies of display and visualization. In this way, she creates queer drafts of a society whose central characteristics are hybridity and fluidity and thus assert themselves against the standardization efforts of our present.
Aramis Navarro
lives and works in St. Gallen, Switzerland
In the works of Aramis Navarro, the thematic focus is on the relationship between language and image. Questioning this system with the concept of counterpoint, the artist is interested in the moments when the usual harmony is disturbed. From these events the artist draws curiosity and ideas. Driven by an urge to explore, the artist works in multimedia with texts, installations and paintings that are marked by poetry, humor and narrative moments. The artist also deals with the representability of temporality, and its connection to language in his series of works "timestudies", in which he paints canvases, cuts together, creating a network of his works and of references.
Aramis Navarro graduated with a Master's in Fine Arts from Zurich University of the Arts in 2021, and his first extensive institutional solo exhibition is on view at Alte Fabrik.
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Extract of the Exhibition Text – by Irene Grillo, Curator
On the raw left canvas top right is the word "caviar". Below it, overlapping, the prefix "RE-" is repeated in orange and pink colors. Two weeks before the opening, Aramis Navarro (*1991, lives and works in St. Gallen and Rapperswil-Jona) answers the question of what "caviar" has to do with time - one of the main themes of the exhibition "never odd or even" in the *ALTEFABRIK - first with a smile, then with a confident and convincing voice: "It is the memory of a previous life of the picture". Welcome to the linguistic cosmos of Aramis Navarro!
A meticulous study of language, phonetics, and writing, as well as a keen interest in fabrics and materials of various kinds, form the most important components of Navarro's artistic practice. In a constant exploration of art history, culture and socially relevant issues, he creates paintings, sculptures, installations and texts that are characterized by poetry, humor and an unforced lightness. In the exhibition "never odd or even", in addition to the structure of language, the nature of time plays a fundamental role anew. On a tightrope walk between personal feelings and scientific knowledge, Navarro approaches the dimension of time and explores it from different perspectives. In parallel, he explores the question of the visual representability of time in painting and examines it within his own artistic production.
Timestudy n°60 "RE (2023) abruptly immerses visitors in the complex and symbolic work of Aramis Navarro as soon as they enter the exhibition. The painting consists of several pieces sewn together, including sections of older paintings by the artist that h a v e been painted over or developed further, various textiles from Navarro's fabric archive, and fragments of damaged oil paintings from the Brockenhaus. In addition to the linguistic elements mentioned at the beginning, other objects can be seen on the surface composed in this way: a blue chair, a brick wall with incompletely defined contours, and an image of Eugène Delacroix's (1798 -1863) La Liberté guidant le peuple (1830), digitally processed by the artist, which stands out from the foreground in garish green. The material diversity here goes hand in hand with the complexity of the work's content, whereby the genesis of the work is not always clear, the process is more like an intuitive game than a subtle preoccupation with forms and meanings.
Patric Sandri
lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland
Patric Sandri is concerned with abstract painting. The elements of the painting play a central role: the paint, the canvas, the stretcher. He makes these given components the subject of his work. He experiments and tests new possibilities to see how far he can explore the medium of painting with these limited tools. Besides geometry, perception and seeing play an essential role in his work. Errors and contradictions in perceptions are central moments that influence his pictorial ideas and compositions.
Franziska Stünkel
lives and works in Hannover & Berlin, Germany
Franziska Stünkel is a global artist, film director and screenwriter. She studied fine arts at the University of Fine Arts Kassel. After her diploma she became a master student of Prof. Uwe Schrader.
Franziska Stünkel's photographs are shown in museums, art institutions and galleries. Awards for her photographic work include the Audi Art Award and the Berlin Hyp Art Award. In 2023, she was nominated for the prestigious Prix Pictet. Her photography book Coexist has been published by Kehrer Verlag. Franziska Stünkel's photographs are represented in private and public collections, including the collection of the Sprengel Museum.
Franziska Stünkel's films have been screened at over 170 film festivals in 19 countries and have won several awards. Her current feature film as director and screenwriter is based on the life of Dr. Werner Teske, who was executed in the former GDR in 1981. Nahschuss, starring Lars Eidinger, was released in German cinemas in 2021. International theatrical releases followed in 2022/23.
Emerging Artists
Emerging artists already have both feet in the art world. We support them to get in touch with galleries, museums and collections to realize first important projects.
Piet Baumgartner
lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland
Piet Baumgartner is a visual artist and director. He works transdisciplinarily in film, visual arts and theatre. He worked as a journalist before completing an MA in film directing at the Zurich University of the Arts and later the "Drehbuchwerkstatt München". This was followed by training with Andrej Wajda in Warsaw and assistant role with Frank Castorf and Rene Pollesch at the Schauspielhaus Zurich. Piet Baumgartner works both independently and collectively with Rio Wolta and has received numerous international awards. He lives in Zurich and lectures at the F+F School of Art and Design.
Vierwind - Micha Häni
lives and works in Zollikofen, Switzerland
Born and raised in Bern in 1994, Micha Häni (Vierwind) did an apprenticeship as a 3D polydesigner after primary school. After the apprenticeship, he continued working as a freelancer in the profession. As a sideline, he started creating his own images and selling them. Since 2016 he is self-employed and works full time as a freelance artist. His skills are mainly shown in painting, graffiti and illustrations. He now exhibits his works all over the world.
Hinano Hayama
lives and works in Hokkaido, Japan
Hinano Hayama (b. 1995) lives and works in Hokkaido, Japan. Her unique creative process does not begin with a concrete image in mind. Before she begins to paint or draw, she focuses on her physical sensations and transfers these momentary feelings to the canvas. The next brushstrokes are always an immediate reaction to what she has just created on the canvas. She does not have a thought in mind that she wants to portray in her paintings, but her deeply rooted intuitive painting forms the path of the thoughts that pass through her mind in the state of creation. Her paintings can be seen as an overlay of momentary feelings, reactions to what she has created, and a visualization of her thoughts. Hinano Hayama describes that "the layered paintings show where she is in the moment."
After her stay at Chateau Orquevaux, Hinano Hayama realized how being in nature nurtures her artistic creation. After living in Tokyo for years, she decided to move to a remote area in Hokkaido where nature continues to inspire her work. In addition, the tranquil atmosphere of the northern Japanese island helps her introspective creative process.
Emanuel Heim
lives and works in Berlin, Germany
Emanuel Heim, born in 1992 in Lenzburg, Switzerland, completed the preliminary design course at the Schule für Gestaltung Aarau, attended the specialist class for graphics, space and new media at the Schule für Gestaltung Basel and graduated from the specialist class for graphics in Lucerne. In 2017, Heim moved to Berlin. After three residencies with the Palace Collective in Gorzanów, Poland and several group exhibitions in Berlin and with us in Lucerne, Emanuel Heim's first major solo exhibition took place at Theater Rüsselsheim. His preferred technique is oil painting. Photographed here by Tegwen Evans.
Nicolas Vionnet
lives and works in Grüt, Switzerland
Swiss artist Nicolas Vionnet is fascinated by irritations. A multi-disciplinary artist, Vionnet is creator of thought-provoking, jarring and sometimes playful interventions between objects, conceptual paintings and installations which provoke a dialogue with their environment. His works do not shout for attention, but instead present themselves through subtlety and wit. To engage with his works is to feel a build-up of tension that challenges viewers and triggers curiosity.
Upcoming Artists
We follow and support up-and-coming artists from the very beginning of their artistic career. We see potential in them and would like to help develop it in the best possible way.
Michaela Schmid
lives and works in Lucerne, Switzerland
The Lucerne artist Michaela Schmid (*1987) explores the field of tension between surfaces, shapes and colors in her work. Thus, lively wall works are created from pictorial elements that come together to form a composition through the force of gravity. A game between dynamics and balance, in which the color as a mood carrier creates a sensual access to the work. Already in her training as a fashion designer, the artist was able to develop a sense for the weighting of forms and colors. In her subsequent art studies, this was transferred to painting and photography. Today, the artist experiments with a wide variety of materials and continuously expands her artistic practice.
Oliver Kümmerli
lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland
The photographic medium has always been central to his artistic practice. The relationship to the supposedly objective, but also to the subjective, has been crucial for Oliver to explore, understand and rethink the techniques of this medium. Oliver is interested in pushing boundaries by exploring where the image ends and space begins, as well as as well as the material and textural properties of the image. Therefore, he treats the photograph as an object rather than a simple image. Through this approach, Oliver examines architectural landscapes and transforms them from the outside into the exhibition space exhibition space, from two-dimensional images into three-dimensional installations, around a a spatial narrative. He often wonders what might happen if we demolished all buildings to explore the potential to create something new from the ruins. His focus is on spatial practices and the production of space as they reflect the current state of the built environment and the possible future of architecture. This research has led him to develop a series of works in which he continually rearranges parts to see new ways of looking. One of these series is xeno-places, in which he reshapes interstitial spaces, transforming interstices, gaps and niches from architectural models into alien structures, and from positive to negative spaces, in order to challenge our conventional notions of place by blurring the boundaries between the physical and the non-physical, the tangible and the intangible.