Roman Signer
dal 29/11/2001 al 2/3/2002
Segnalato da
29/11/2001
Roman Signer
Camden Arts Centre, London
His work evolves from scrupulously prepared sculptural events which take place either in the Swiss mountains where he lives, and then dispatched in the form of a film, a photo sequence, or a video - or as site-specific events or installations.
Roman Signer's 'sculptural moments' cause objects and
phenomena to do things which they would not normally do.
His work evolves from scrupulously prepared sculptural
events which take place either in the Swiss mountains
where he lives, and then dispatched in the form of a film, a
photo sequence, or a video - or as site-specific events or
installations.
Simple objects like balloons, buckets, a canoe, a bicycle, a
rifle, water, explosives, are exposed to processes of
movement or material transformation (melting, firing,
catapulting, sinking, floating). All available expertise,
inventiveness and experience is harnessed to activate the
object and create a kind of successful fiasco in which
anarchy can become poetic as an object is made to
behave in an unprecedented or unforeseen way.
His works
make the everyday world visible as something ambiguously
amusing that can turn inscrutable and frightening. Signer's
recent disturbances have shifted away from the physical
reality of the exploding object to ones which disrupt the
mind.
Signer has been working since the mid 1970s, but only
recently has the importance of his work become more
widely recognised and his influence on younger generations
of Swiss and international artists acknowledged. Roman
Signer was born in 1938 in Appenzell, Switzerland, and has
shown extensively in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, The
Netherlands and the United States.