Céline Condorelli / Andrea Heller

In her work Céline Condorelli (b. 1974, FR/I, lives and works in GB/PT) connects art with her environment. The artist transfers elements of urban construction, architecture and interior design, but also aspects of museum scenography such as lighting, support structures and seating, into installations, sculptures and videos. Thus the components and materials of a building, which are actually part of the formal language of building construction, become themselves works of art. By placing these elements in the context of the neutral museum space, she opens up a discourse on the manner in which exhibitions are presented, reflecting on values, the visibility of things, forms of communication and manipulative interventions. Above and beyond this Condorelli creates connections between history and socio-economic contexts in order to question existing and possible intersections and at the same time to examine how these can be translated in reality in the exhibition space. In her exhibitions the artist creates new constellations of her own preoccupations with various themes, spaces and their contexts. This, the artist’s first exhibition in Switzerland, presents a selection of significant existing works as well as new pieces.

Andrea Heller (b. 1975, CH) makes works on paper as well as ceramic, plaster and glass objects, in which a world of fragile landscapes, associative traces and anthropomorphic hybrid creatures unfolds. In her works on paper soft colour gradations in watercolour and ink develop into cristalline objects and forms, that oscillate between different scales – diffuse and hard, attractive and uncanny. At the same time the artist examines systems, sequences and orders. This becomes particularly clear in her large scale drawings as well as in a new series of paintings on textile. The artist, who lives and works in Biel, has conceived the work L’Endroit de l’envers (2019) especially for this exhibition. The painted, wooden structure reaches almost to the ceiling of the approximately 6m high Salle Poma. Reflecting the conditions of our environment, Andrea Heller focuses on aspects such as deconstruction, instability and changeableness, creating an installation which fills the space and can be experienced in a number of ways.