EXHIBITOR PRESENTATIONS OF ART INTERNATIONAL ZURICH 2021

Texts about the exhibitors of the 23rd Art Fair ART INTERNATIONAL ZURICH in October 2021.

Web presentation of the exhibitors 2021:
fineartdiscovery.com/2021

Fondation Artists-Way, Switzerland / Israel
« Un original pour chacun » - A bridge of culture
Three contemporary artists from different backgrounds and countries are presented at this year's ART INTERNATIONAL ZURICH. The exhibition 'From Tel Aviv to Berlin and Zurich' gives the visitor an insight into how culture and art are connected.
ASNABY is a French Israeli artist currently living in Tel Aviv where he creates his artwork. He is fascinated by "wheels", which led him to create the Wheelbook and the series of Wheel paintings. The series represent the wheel of history, of which humanity is a part. Asnaby is a Parisian-born painter of themes concentrating on concealment, stigma and covering, challenging historical information held to be "the truth." He has studied with various artists from the Italian and Spanish "nouvelle vague," and especially with his teacher Herzl Emanuel. Asnaby moved to Tel Aviv in 2012. His new work is more personal, as visible in the new series, Devour and Give Birth (Bolea-Laledet), in which he himself is involved as the subject. The man in the painting is full of conflicting emotions, sensations, and behaviours, confronting his former identity as an "exile" as he takes on a new identity as an Israeli. Actually, he stores these emotions, swelling to a point at which he is unable to recognize himself anymore but must "digest" to give birth to the new self. For the past 20 years, Asnaby's œuvre has created broad interest across international exhibitions and private collections.
Contemporary artist MAKA is of Georgian origin and resides in Switzerland. Her artwork is a flow of colours, magical, and intriguing. With the vibrant use of colour, ALONA HARPAZ tries to bring some humour into her paintings. In many ways her work is about finding balance and harmony between opposing forces. Alona Harpaz lives and works in Berlin.
Artists at the Fair: Alona Harpaz, Asnaby, Maka Dadiani
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alpengluehen art group (aag), Switzerland
The photographs of alpengluehen art group are in fact collages, in which original photos, computer graphics but also own oil paintings, lithographs and hand drawings are brought together in digitalized form. The combination of these techniques produces astonishing results, the landscapes of the Engadin are presented in a new way as processed art object. Whether it is the panorama of St. Moritz, the abandoned mountain hut or the horses hurrying away: the idyll is captured, changed, disturbed, and enriched.
Superficial simplicity is combined with artistic-technical refinement. Some things, however, are based - as in science - on accidental discoveries by the searching artists. In unique artworks a parallel existing reality becomes visible, which shows the Engadin from a new perspective.
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Astrid Baenziger, Switzerland
"What began by drawing comics has expanded into an intensive exploration of various acrylic painting and collage techniques. Astrid Baenziger's works are partly figuratively clear motifs, partly abstract painting. Sometimes they are exploding flower gardens, nostalgic clotheslines, paintings with poetic or political text content or stories that she wants to tell the viewer. Influenced by the fashion, film and music of the sixties and seventies, she repeatedly creates pop-like artist portraits in the shrill patterns and colours typical of the time. Astrid Baenziger uses her art as a mouthpiece for political statements, to question social structures or simply to revive the nostalgia of past times. For many years now, the artist has been showing her works worldwide in solo and group exhibitions.
Her acrylic and collage paintings have been shown in London, Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, Verona, Milan, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. In October 2015, she exhibited for the first time at the X. ART BIENNALE FLORENCE at the FORTE DA BASSO, as well as in 2017 following at the 57th ART BIENNALE VENICE in a group of 60 artists at the PALAZZO ALBRIZZI CAPPELO. Astrid Baenziger lives with her family in Bern." Text: Miriam Lenz / Journalist, Bern
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CasaGalleria MonteGeneroso, Switzerland
CasaGalleria MonteGeneroso presents the "Black Flower Secret Garden" by Yuri Catania. An intimate photographic journey that reveals blooming flowers swallowed by the darkness of a dreamlike garden in Ticino. This project was created during the first Lockdown in March 2020, Yuri Catania carefully observed the world around him, surrounded by luminous and colourful flowers floating in a dreamlike and intimate - typical of the night hours - dimension. In his constant search for uniqueness and the desire to combine different means of expression, Catania intervenes in the photographs. Some he alters with painterly interventions, others by inserting female figures. These were digitally modelled in 3D. They are symbolic women who, sleeping in the tranquillity of nature and surrounded by flowers, rediscover their essence free from beauty stereotypes, racial prejudices, and sexual objectification.
Yuri Catania is a Swiss Italian visual artist. He started to work as a photographer and video director in the field of fashion and luxury. Due to the countless trips around Asia, mostly in Japan and the United States, being in contact with different people, cultures, and landscapes, his outlook evolved quickly. And thus, the media of photography has become not enough for his creativity that has deviated into new languages like digital manipulation, lettering, painting, and collages. Yuri Catania set a tone for his career when the art curator Renè Julien Praz invited him to exhibit at Palais de Tokyo firstly and, at the Galerie Perrotin two years later. Catania research the beauty of life in the small things showing a realistic vision of this time.
Artist at the Fair: Yuri Catania
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Donegel' Chong, Switzerland / Malaysia
Donegel' Chong, originally from Malaysia, has been based in Thurgau since 2018. His art career began in 2018, after a serious illness. Since then, Chong's original artworks have already been presented in China, Germany, the UK, Italy, Norway, and Switzerland. His paintings are also in private collections in Spain and Thailand.
Donegel' Chong's artworks are biographical to varying degrees - they deal mainly with his preferences. Chong calls them "personal reflections of life". Donegel' Chong has developed his own unique style of painting, with brushstrokes he calls "Kurrrlys" or "emotional release brushstrokes". Since 2018, he has continuously used this technique in varying degrees of intensity. Donegel' Chong is inspired by Francis Bacon and Yayoi Kusama, Cy Twombly and Egon Schiele. At Art International Zurich 2021, he will present the continuation of his FEEDING series.
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Luco Cormerais, France
Luco Cormerais first becomes a stone sculptor, then a sculptor on paper, which he cuts into repetitive shapes with a unique cutting technique until he reaches a three-dimensional graphic composition. The work appears in an undulating, light-emitting structure. As a passionate adherent of quantum physics and philosophy, he arranges and places the particles like waves in a "field" in a delicate and poetic way. He seems to stabilize the dance of the atoms in a work that displays contemplative emotions.
The work on kraft paper explores the possibilities of a modest and common medium that, through the action of a cutting, separating, and tearing gesture, changes its own essence beyond the apparent possibilities. The paper is envisaged as a possible three-dimensional surface, where the drawing and graphic design is not laid on the sheet but inscribed into the material.
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Eilbhe Donovan, Ireland
Eilbhe Donovan's minimalist work captures wading birds gathering in the marsh, seabirds circling over the surf and birds in flight, as well as other coastal scenes captured in a great expanse. Walking on nearby remote Atlantic beaches and kayaking the rugged coastline, Eilbhe Donovan is constantly inspired by the marine environment she encounters on the Wild Atlantic Way.
She works with ink and monoprint on special cotton paper sustainably sourced from a factory in England. Each piece is a different size and is torn by hand. Her work conveys peace and simple beauty. No two of her works are the same size - the image and the subject determine the format and size of the work. The finished image is reduced in size by tearing, a precise process done by hand that can ruin a work if not done correctly. Each work is framed under UV museum glass.
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Elevate Art, Germany
Elevate Art is a German-British start-up that rents, leases and sells artworks internationally.
London-based artist Thomas D. Wright, also known as Tommy Fiendish, has a wide range of experience in various creative fields. His work is often experimental, combining expressive marks with gestural abstract ideas full of graphic detail. In his paintings, Fiendish combines ancient painting with surreal metaphors, depicting dystopian social commentary with a touch of macabre comedy.
Photographer Maja Jerrentrup, aka Jamari Lior, focuses on cultural themes, which she both stages and depicts in documentary form. In addition to her training as a visual anthropologist, the influences of Indian art and philosophy cannot be overlooked in her work.
Jerrentrup holds a professorship in media and photography in Pune, India, and is a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Photography.
Tim Onday, also known as Tim Guse, takes the viewer on an emotional journey. The Brilon-based artist humorously questions the concept of movement with its awkwardness and vulnerability, creating intensely personal moments of abstraction through his painting.
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Sina Faccioli, Switzerland
The works of the young artist Sina Faccioli reflect the interplay of colours, influenced by nature. Using a spatula technique, she applies different layers of colour in an abstract manner, which merge into each other and create a wide variety of colour moods. Sina Faccioli, a young aspiring Swiss artist, born in 1992, lives and works in Aesch, a rural village near Basel. Inspired by nature, she reproduces the colour combinations and nuances using different spatula and brush techniques on canvases of different sizes. Rough, raw, and unadulterated, like nature itself, her paintings also shine in extraordinary colour nuances.
Sina Faccioli's largest series to date - Second Glanze - concentrates on this abstraction of form through large-scale superimposed layers of paint, which merge into each other and thus create the new structure and new nuance of colour through each further layer applied. The interplay of form and colour creates its own moods, new environments, and realities, sometimes only after a closer second look.
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Galerie Guernieri, France
Galerie Guernieri from Paris presents the painter Pierre-Luc Bartoli and the sculptor Denis Perez at the fair.
Pierre-Luc Bartoli, born in Aix en Provence in 1973, was immersed in painting from an early age thanks to his art-loving father. Self-taught, Pierre-Luc Bartoli has endeavoured to master traditional techniques in order to avoid the rules. For him, the danger lies in virtuosity, including his own counter-technique. He dares to question himself constantly. But in spite of this attraction for experimentation and accidents, his artistic path is coherent, made up of return trips to old motifs and techniques that he constantly revisits and rewrites.
In 2002, at the age of 29, Pierre-Luc Bartoli settled in Paris and presented his first monograph at the Selzer Lejeune gallery, followed in 2003 by a solo exhibition at the CNEA in the Grenier des Grands Augustins, Paris 6ème. Since then, he has exhibited regularly on the theme of landscape, urban scenes and the figure. Pierre-Luc Bartoli is in the tradition of French neo-expressionism. Faced with a canvas or a wooden panel, he lets himself be guided by the brush, the colour, and the material. The result is necessarily fragile. But it is from this fragility that the work draws its power. It is difficult to detach oneself from it, impossible to ignore it. He proposes a painting with strong gestures, worked in matter, instinctive. His work never leaves you indifferent. In 2019, Pierre-Luc Bartoli meets the Parisian gallery owner Cyril Guernieri, based in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with whom he begins a new collaboration.
Denis Pérez's work is closely linked to the living world. The sculptor creates organic forms from earth, wood, stone, and bronze. With this approach, he explores the aesthetics of form in the play of surfaces and lines of tension. One theme of his work is the human being. Here Perez models the face and uses facial expressions to illustrate the fragility of the being. Pérez proceeds similarly in his work with the skin of the tree. He takes the material in new directions, in an alchemy of forms, movement and life.
Denis Pérez finds his inspiration by coming into contact with the material. The traces of life, left by nature, are borrowed, and redirected, breathing life into the sculptures. The plant world remains ever present in his work: the growth and decay, the silhouettes of large wild grasses, plus the shadow of a human being in nature. Pérez evokes what remains. Denis Pérez creates abstract series like Cocoon, Coil or evocative series like Footprint, Draped, Silhouette, Growth. In Denis Perez's work, the play of fullness and emptiness leads to the discovery of the sculptural form in its entirety.
Artists at the fair: Pierre-Luc Bartoli, Denis Perez
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Elmira Herren, Switzerland
Drawn stories. Each flower is an accomplished perfect form or system that represents a certain kind of character. Sacred geometry determines the number of its petals, branches, and curves. And in terms of describing beauty, a flower is a perfected, harmonious form of existence.
The precise drawings are created during a process of meditation. Elmira Herren previously used her amazing drawing skills in her profession as an interior designer.
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Kerstin Hochuli, Switzerland
Kerstin Hochuli draws inspiration for her works from nature, abstracting what she sees. Her main sources of inspiration are structured surfaces such as bark, cracked earth and weathered walls, but also water, blossoms, and foggy landscapes. Hochuli's paintings thematically reflect transformations and life processes.
The artist expresses these with various techniques, through the use of natural materials such as cold or hot wax, homemade marble powder putty, pigments, stains, sand, ink, bitumen, and oil paints.
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Elena Lagun, Switzerland / Belarus
Elena Lagun creates realistic portraits with pastel, figurative sceneries and abstraction with oil, minimalism with charcoal and landscapes in encaustic.
With Encaustic (hot wax painting) Elena Lagun acquired the oldest painting technique in the world, in which hot wax and soft pigments are used as a medium.
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Laprokay, Switzerland
Gabriella Prokai aka Laprokay (1973 in Hungary) lives and works as a freelance artist in Neerach near Zurich. Laprokay has developed a distinctive style for her visual language. Laprokay is inspired by the female figure, its aesthetic form and beauty. Charming postures and expressive looks create a mystical and erotic mood.
Laprokay's sketches are created directly on the canvas. She draws on the already finished, completely rough surface, which she has treated with putty and later covers with several layers of acrylic before the actual work begins. All the figurative subjects are painted in oil. She uses the relief-like surface to create different depths. The arbitrarily placed deep cracks and grooves in the acrylic give the painting more dimension.
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Peter Lindenberg, Germany
Berlin-based painter and sculptor Peter Lindenberg has had exhibitions in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Luxembourg, the USA, and China. Inspired by plants and flowers, Lindenberg's paintings stem from a mixture of controlled intensity, ordered exaltation and theatrical, abstract narratives. Plant patterns attract the viewer's gaze like flowers attract insects. His paintings bear the names of cultivated dahlias.
Since 2008, Peter Lindenberg has curated solo and group exhibitions at KUNSTRAUM F200 in Berlin's Friedrichstrasse. The art space offers artists from the independent scene generous space for an honest examination of current positions in art.
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Mamuka Kapanadze, Georgia / Switzerland
Mamuka Kapanadze is a Georgian artist and iconographer. Mamuka was born in 1979 and studied at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts from 2002 to 2006. From 2007 to 2015, he participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Tbilisi, Georgia. He painted frescoes in several Georgian churches.
Mamuka began his work as a modern expressionist painter. He plays masterfully with perspectives and colour gradients. In his landscapes and still lifes, he uses both fine lines and broad brushstrokes to tell finely arranged stories that the viewer rediscovers with each glance. Currently, he mainly uses mixed media and various abstract styles such as paint splatter, abstract expressionism, and lyrical abstraction.
Mamuka's works are in numerous private collections in Georgia and abroad, as well as in several public collections, including the Georgian Embassy in Switzerland.
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Heinz Marzohl, Switzerland
His profound knowledge of reprography, typography, serigraphy, materials, and colour theory was a valuable springboard for the painter, printer, and advertising specialist Heinz Marzohl to enter the world of art painting. In over 25 years, countless sketches and studies were produced and, building on these, elaborate, profound but mostly colourful paintings on canvas. Many of these paintings are characterized by personal, emotional experiences.
Heinz Marzohl found inspiration for his designs in nature. For example, lines of force from animal bodies, drawings on butterflies, weathered wood grain or primeval structures and cracks from rock cliffs of storm-tossed seashores. Over the years, the struggle for vivid lines and forms to depict touching sceneries has led to an independent, unmistakable pictorial language.
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Jozek Nowak, Germany / Poland
Jozek Nowak is a wood sculptor in perfection and with passion. His life-size figures carved from wood with a chainsaw radiate individuality, liveliness, and strength.
The sculptures and compositions are able to touch the viewer with strong expressiveness.
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Gero Paul, Germany
Gero Paul has devoted himself entirely to digital art. This gives rise to fantastic colour explosions, surreal and photorealistic, with an unimagined spatial depth and full of beguiling fantasies. In addition to large-format pictures full of life, the artist works on political and social satires of a distinctly biting nature.
For the most part, the pictorial compositions are intentionally based on the classical pictorial structure of European painting. Pieter Bruegel (the Elder) and Hieronymus Bosch are seminal for Gero Paul's pictorial language. To unite the story of life, good and evil, heaven and hell in one picture is his motivation. Another area is colourful and positive landscape, nature, and flower paintings. Telling stories with pictorial means is his great passion.
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Victor Popov, Germany / Russia
Victor Popov was born in 1952 in the USSR, studied art in Lviv, Novosibirsk and Saint Petersburg. His individual style contains fantastic-realistic components and elements of caricature. In 1991 he emigrated to Germany. His works are shown internationally at numerous exhibitions.
Something painterly is always present in Victor Popov's sculptures. His conception of the object has its roots in the tradition of Suprematism and Constructivism; at the same time, influences of Cubism and Futurism can be detected. Popov's sculptures suggest dynamism and movement but are at the same time playful and balanced in the formal language with which Popov breaks away from tradition.
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Smaltlight, Switzerland
The young art project SMALTLIGHT presents four emerging contemporary artists to the Swiss art market: Ricardo Celma (Argentina) combines forms and techniques of magical realism, baroque, and late Gothic with great craftsmanship to create something new and distinctive. Also from Argentina, Alejandro Parisi combines great compositions of colour, light and space that immerse the viewer in mysterious scenes that lead to existential questions. Austrian textile artist Florian Nörl intervenes his place at this interface with an interactive sculptural and painterly exploration of the textile material. Spanish artist Marco Prieto explores the idea of violence as a tool and creative source and materialises this in his paintings.
Ricardo Celma (1975 in Buenos Aires) had his first solo exhibition at the age of 16. Since 2001, he has exhibited not only in Argentina, but also in Peru, Mexico, Panama, Spain, Japan, and the Netherlands. His artworks are in several private art collections such as the Vatican's Collection. Celma usually works with a live model. His very personal work contains elements of Baroque, Flemish painting, magic realism, and hyperrealism with echoes of Gustav Klimt, Alphonse Mucha, Raphael, Rembrandt, and other Master of Art History. Celma's artworks appear mysterious to the viewer, as if from a dream.
Alejandro Parisi (1966 in Buenos Aires) studied painting with well-known Argentinean artists such as Roberto Bosco, Alberto Ferrara and Fabián Galdámez as well as graphic art with Carlos Fels. His artworks have been shown in several exhibitions in Argentina and the USA. Parisi's great compositions combine colour, light and space and immerse the viewer in mysterious scenes that lead to existential questions.
Florian Nörl (born 1989) studied textile/art/design in Linz (Austria), where he has been living and working since receiving his master's degree and a studio scholarship. He recently had a solo exhibition at the Max Planck Institute in Munich. " Textile Stone" is a material developed by Florian Nörl that redefines the boundaries of the textile medium in visual art. In each artwork, he layers memory on memory - like sediments in natural stones. In a special interplay, he explores, opens up and shapes the plastic and visual properties of textiles into a tactile experience in a long working process.
Marco Prieto (1992 in Madrid) realised at the age of 12 that he had to become an artist. His artworks reflect the power of portraiture through the representation of a specific identity. Prieto appropriates "violence" as an important part of his painting process, which allows him to open up the possibilities of the unexpected and leaves no room for the usual boundaries of painting. Colouring and a brush that has come alive create a hard portrait of our contemporary identity through the artist's use of an absolute gesture: the stroke.
Artists at the fair: Ricardo Celma, Alejandro Parisi, Florian Nörl, Marco Prieto
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Smart Ship Gallery, Japan
Smart Ship Gallery was founded in 2011 in Tokyo. Also, since 2011, Smart Ship has continuously enriched Art International Zurich with its global view of the zeitgeist.
Smart Ship presents works by contemporary artists internationally under the guiding principle that individual dignity and identity can be built and conveyed through art. Smart here stands for the promotion of creative thinking. Ship, the ship traditionally connects not only trade but also art, culture, and social life of Japan with the world. Smart Ship makes extraordinary creations from all over the world accessible to the public in order to promote cultural and social creativity with the help of a conscious living intellect.
Art should be strongly integrated into society. In all eras, art is something created by people, its meaning lies in the unique human expression that reflects social realities. Smart Ship assumes that interest in and demands on art are rooted in elementary humanity, the longing to understand one's own self and to fill it with life, as well as to allow subsequent generations to participate in it.
Artists at the fair: Michiko, Tomohiro Mae, Katsuyo Matsumaru, Kazuki Matsumura, Aiko Mizutani, Kumiko Tamura, Noriko Takaoka, Taeko Tsunoda, Katsuya Ueda, Sachiko Yabuki
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Chris van Weidmann, Switzerland
"You have to learn to open your eyes" (Galileo Galilei) and only then can the teeny-tiny writing in Chris van Weidmann's pictures be recognised in all precision. With perfect craftsmanship, calligraphy produces breathtakingly precise works. Seen from a distance, they form a picture; only up close do you notice that the entire work consists of the artist's handwriting.
The hair-thin works in ink pen sharpen the eye for tiny wonders of nature or stories from everyday life. In all of her handwritten unique works, Chris van Weidmann subtly combines image, word, and text content.
She taught herself the art of calligraphy at the age of 10 and has kept the passion until today. "With my works, I want people to take a closer look and understand that some things are only apparent at second sight".
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YanYan, Switzerland / China
The Chinese-Swiss artist YanYan started painting at the age of 6 years. She completed her studies in painting in China and has lived in Switzerland for over 20 years. She is present at various national and international art fairs.
Her paintings combine a pinch of humour, pure colours, the beauty of the human body but also a pinch of eroticism. Her works are influenced by traditional Chinese painting on the one hand, but also by typical motifs from Switzerland on the other. Her exhibition motto: "Two worlds, one artist!"
YanYan often works in series, which revolve around one theme. This is how the series "Made in Switzerland", "Matterhorn" and "Porcelain" have been created in recent years.
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Maura Patrizia Zoller, Switzerland
Maura Patrizia Zoller is a freelance artist who works with abstract painting using various techniques. The rather large-format works are mostly inspired by nature, light, and colours.
The artist works mainly with acrylic and uses a mixed technique of collage, colour layering, spatula work, tar, graphite, and sand. She applies layer upon layer to create a space that reflects depth and breadth, creating closeness and distance at the same time. Sometimes ambiguous signs are worked into the picture with handwriting or block letters.
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