Christian Scholz was born in Stockholm in 1951 and now lives and works in Zurich. On his way southward from the North,
he developed su cient motivation and enthusiasm to build a signi cant body of photographic work in Switzerland. In equal measure, it includes works both in colour and classic black-and- white but eschews modish gimmickry, pretension and artistic whimsy. Mostly, Scholz works for years, and even decades, on series and groups of works. e results are single editions or portfolios of art.
Juxtaposed with the “Body Project”, for instance, we nd his work “ e Compass of Light” or groups of works on architecture and experiments with negative printing. Since 1989, Scholz has been building up a portrait project in and for Switzerland that meets with increasing enthusiasm in private and public collec- tions. As Roger Fayet of the Swiss Institute for Art Research puts it, “a project of virtually encyclopaedic magnitude”. Scholz’s aim is to give the portrait as a genre – in the sense of August Sander – a much stronger positioning.
Werner Bischof was born in Switzerland 1916. He studied photography with Hans Finsler in his native Zurich at the School for Arts and Crafts, then opened a photography and advertising studio. In 1942 he became a freelancer for Du magazine, which published his first major photo essays in 1943. Bischof received international recognition after the publication of his 1945 reportage on the devastation caused by the Second World War. In the years that followed, Bischof traveled in Italy and Greece for Swiss Relief, an organization dedicated to post-war reconstruction. In 1948 he photographed the Winter Olympics in St Moritz for Life magazine. After trips to Eastern Europe, Finland, Sweden and Denmark, he worked for Picture Post, The Observer, Illustrated and Epoca. He was the first photographer to join Magnum with the founding...
Press release - "Christian Scholz permits us to share the clarity of his perception and, as a result, a truth present in the picture that eschews egotistical expressiveness. However, this artistic resolve calls for subjects in which it can unfold without falling prey to the anecdote of the world. "Bodies" disseminates themes of this type... His bodies tell us about their conditionality, about the fabric of the features they have in common, about the history and present of photography, about unfashionable individualism and the joy following this position can cause." (Martin Heller, introduction to "Bodies", the book, Basel 2011)
Flying bodies, human bodies, bodies of sound and animal bodies: THE BODY PROJECT is the rst exhibition to provide an insight into all four body gurations that arti...