5 May – 18 June, 2005
Exhibition
Opening Thursday May 5th, 6-8pm
Spencer Brownstone Gallery is delighted to present ‘Honey’, our second one-person exhibition by Zilla Leutenegger. The artist will be showing two new video and drawing installations that will be interspersed among further groups of new drawings, transforming the gallery into an all-over space of multiple projections and works on paper.
'Honey' (2005), continues Leutenegger’s innovative combination of video projection and wall drawing, while the second new video installation, In Der Wohnung Von FSH (2005), features an animated image projected onto a group of large drawings of domestic interiors. This new work extends the artist’s interest in presence and absence, and the tentative possibilities that her chosen media – drawing and video - offer for the embodiment of each.
Leutenegger’s highly lyrical work in video has been termed ‘video drawing’ which goes some way toward conveying its spontaneity and expressive power. After working for a number of years as a buyer for a fashion house, the artist began to produce her own video and digital animation works, many of which feature the artist herself, or an unidentified teenage girl that stands for her, as it does for all of us. The setting of the works range from the intimate and domestic (the bedroom mirror with it’s associations of ‘becoming’, being the locus of a number of key works) through fantasy landscapes such as the moon, and exaggerated ciphers of the artist’s Swiss nationality, such as wooden chalets with steaming bowls of porridge. Throughout, Leutenegger’s work maintains a humorous performative element informed by the worlds of fashion and music, but always with the sensibility of the consumer struggling to create an identity and an agency for herself among the myriad of proffered representations.
Artist Bio
Zilla Leutenegger was born in Switzerland and lives and works in Zürich. The artist’s current exhibitions and projects include two new commissions for the Herzog & de Meuron retrospective at the Netherlands Architecture Institute; a solo exhibition at the Swiss Pavillion at World Expo in Japan; a solo show at Fundacio la caixa, Barcelona; and ‘Swiss Made’, a group exhibition at Cobra Museum, Amsterdam. ‘ZILLA’, the artist’s new glossy magazine-format book published by Edition Fink, Zürich will be available at Spencer Brownstone Gallery during the exhibition.