Andrea Christen 24 october - 20 december 2003

Andreas Christen was born in 1936 at Bubendorf near Basle. From 1956 to 1959 he attended the school of applied art in Zurich, where he was one of the first students on the new industrial design course held by Hans Fischli. He has lived and worked in Zurich since 1959.

His most prominent one-man exhibition was the itinerant retrospective held in 1994 and 1995 at the Kunstmuseum in Winterthur, the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain in Dijon, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in La Chaux-de-Fonds and the Josef Albers Museum, Quadrat a Bottrop (catalogue with texts by Dieter Schwarz, Max Bense and Andreas Christen).

Christen’s artistic research commenced within the context of the trends that were emerging in Europe in the late 1950s and was expressed in white monochrome bas-reliefs, in spray-painted wood, that were free from all compositional logic. The basic principle behind his work first appeared in his "Monoforms" (1959): "the idea of raising the central point of a square from the surface allowed me to create planes, lines and points, and produce a line with two intersecting planes."

Equally, the passage from the second to the third dimension, by "raising" one or more points from the surface, led me to forgo the use of colour. Strictly white, Christen’s objects are brought alive only by plays of light and shadow, which fashion the configuration of planes, points and lines in a perceptively unstable manner.

From one series of works to another, the changing inclination of the planes generates countless chiaroscuro shades, which constantly prompt onlookers to change their point of observation to probe the complexity and perceptive mutability of the works. The Lugano exhibition will present seven recent large-format works.