Private Tour through Museum Haus Konstruktiv - Zurich

Current exhibition

Museum Haus Konstruktiv’s solo exhibition on Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972 in Osaka, lives and works in Berlin) is the first to be dedicated to this internationally acclaimed Japanese artist in German-speaking Switzerland. Alongside recent works on paper and sculptural objects, the room-filling thread installation Eye to Eye, specially created for this Zurich exhibition, will be on display. The tying and interweaving of mostly red, black or white threads has occupied Shiota since the beginning of her artistic oeuvre. Driven and fascinated by existential themes such as fear, death and love, along with their subjective narratives, Shiota describes the interwoven threads as symbols of complex interpersonal connections. Thus, her net-like structures, which she herself also sees as three-dimensional drawings, become metaphors for all kinds of relationships. It is not uncommon for her to incorporate objects associated with individual conceptual spaces or personal stories, bringing fundamental themes of human existence into focus.

With sculptural objects that she calls Cells, Shiota refers to the theme of transience, whereby this artist sees death not as an endpoint, but as a metamorphosis that leads to an altered state.

Shiota, who studied painting at Kyoto Seika University, describes the creation of her room-filling installations as an act of liberation from the confines of paper and canvas. After study trips to Canberra, Hamburg, Braunschweig and Berlin, she expanded her artistic oeuvre to include sculptural objects, performances, and stage design for both theatre and opera – and has since come full circle by turning to painting once again. Her latest works on paper, entitled Connected to the Universe, accompany this return.

Shiota’s oeuvre has received international attention, particularly since the 56th Biennale di Venezia in 2015, where she produced the piece The Key in the Hand for the Japanese pavilion. Her artwork is regularly shown in group and solo exhibitions around the world.

This summer, Museum Haus Konstruktiv is holding Switzerland’s first retrospective exhibition dedicated to Italian artist Salvatore Emblema (1929–2006, Terzigno). Paintings, sculptural objects and installations from his estate will be on display.

With his language of forms, Salvatore Emblema produced a striking and archaic-looking oeuvre that cannot be attributed to any particular style, but nevertheless contains evident links to minimal art and arte povera.

After abandoning his art studies at Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli and travelling in Europe, Emblema lived in Rome at the start of the 1950s. At the invitation of David Rockefeller, he moved to New York for a year in 1957. Encountering Mark Rothko and his colour-field paintings would shape his work in the years that followed, as would the landscape in his immediate surroundings at the foot of Mount Vesuvius.

While it was initially financial constraints that prompted Emblema to paint on jute, he was soon fascinated by the uneven and simultaneously transparent structure of this material. He did not apply chemical paints to it, but earth pigments, specially prepared from volcanic ash, petrified lava and oxidized metals. With this limited but intense colour palette, Emblema addressed the theme of transparency and made light another key element of his oeuvre. In addition, he explored these components not only by allowing the stretcher frames to shimmer through and become an integral part of the composition but also, from the 1970s onward, via manipulation of the image carrier: By pulling individual woven threads out of the jute fabric, he produced de-tessute, one of his most multifaceted groups of works, characterised by their distinctive internal structure.