Collecting Lines – Drawings from the Ringier Collection
Chapter II
August 29–November 15, 2015
Opening: August 29, 11am
Villa Flora
Tösstalstr. 44
8400 Winterthur
Switzerland
Hours: Thursday–Sunday 2–6pm,
Free admission
For the 20th anniversary of the Ringier Collection, Arthur Fink and Beatrix Ruf are curating two temporary exhibitions at Villa Flora in Winterthur, both focused on drawings and works on paper.
After 2008′s Blasted Allegories at the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Collecting Lines is the second public presentation of the Ringier Collection. Curatorially supervised by Beatrix Ruf since 1995, the Ringier Collection brings together a wide range of contemporary art positions in photography, video, painting, drawing, objects and installations since the late 1960s. The collecting activity, which has no national or media orientation, focuses particularly on intensively collecting groups of works by the artists represented and giving the works public exposure on company premises and through extensive loans to exhibitions, institutions and museums.
Drawings are a core element of the collection. The collection of works on paper by the early Russian and Western European avant-garde, begun by the spouses Ellen and Michael Ringier back in the 1980s, has been consistently extended over the past 20 years by collecting body of works spanning from early Conceptual artists like John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, Vito Acconci, Robert Barry, Joseph Kosuth, and Allighiero Boetti to oeuvres by leading contemporary artists like John Armleder, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Matt Mullican, Urs Fischer, Jim Shaw, Richard Phillips, Mike Kelley, Karen Kilimnik, Jack Pierson, Joe Bradley, Wade Guyton, Trisha Donnelly, Lutz Bacher and Rosemarie Trockel among many others.
Both exhibitions subscribe to a broadened, conceptually driven view of drawing, which is understood here not as a secondary medium to the work of the artists, not as mere preparatory sketches, but as hierarchically equal and autonomous media within which the conceptual and creative basis of an artistic position is articulated.
Many of the artists represented in the collection have explored drawn formats extensively, questioning its status and conceiving new forms of the dessin: e.g. Trisha Donnelly, who fuses drawing and video; Urs Fischer, who creates drawings in three-dimensional space; or artists like Raymond Pettibon, Larry Johnson and Mike Kelley, who work with the pictorial idiom of comics. The question of the role that drawing might play in the production and distribution of digital images is addressed by artists like Wade Guyton, Seth Price and Helen Marten.
Accompanying the exhibitions will be the launch of a poster project extending concepts of drawings into the field of the digitally produced image. Over 40 artists were invited to take part in a collaborative design project, producing 20 posters in a digital version of the Surrealist game of the cadavre exquis: one artist starts with a design and sends it to the next artist, who adds and passes it on to the next one, and so on. Kerstin Brätsch collaborated with Heimo Zobernig and John Armleder; Karen Kilimnik with Wade Guyton; AA Bronson with Richard Hawkins and Vittorio Brodmann; Helen Marten with Jana Euler; Albert Oehlen with Rodney Graham; and Richard Phillips with Sue Williams. Posters by Uri Aran, Kathryn Andrews, Jim Shaw, John Baldessari, Trisha Donnelly, Shannon Ebner, Liam Gillick, John Miller, Matt Mullican, Jim Shaw, Wilhelm Sasnal, Sean Landers, Rosemarie Trockel, Valentin Carron, Peter Land, Laura Owens, Slavs & Tartars, Rirkrit Tiravanija and others will follow.
Based on this poster project, a publication will be published in collaboration with the publishing house JRP|Ringier.
For these exhibitions, the Ringier Collection takes residence temporarily in Villa Flora, where major works from the Collection of Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler, who used to live in this historic building themselves, were displayed until April 2014. Villa Flora is hosting various cultural activities until the restart of a continuous exhibition activity in the near future.
Press contact: christina.ruf [at] ringier.ch, Ringier AG / Sammlung Ringier, Dufourstr. 23, CH-8008 Zürich
