Böcker av Beat Stutzer

HR Giger (1940-2014) remains one of the outstanding figures in Swiss art and design history. He achieved international fame in 1979 for designing the fantastic creatures and eerie environments that terrified moviegoers in Ridley Scott's science fiction film Alien. Yet, before these iconic creations made him a celebrity and won him an Academy Award for visual effects, Giger was already highly regarded in the international art world of the 1960s and 1970s, for taking one of the most independent positions in the succession of Surrealism. First published in 2007, this only book to date on HR Giger's early work features a comprehensive collection of his drawings, early airbrush paintings, and designs for oppressive environments. It examines Giger's art from its origins and places it in an art history of horror. Most of the works shown in this volume are only rarely on public display. Here they are presented in dialogue with works by distinguished precursors such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Francisco de Goya, Henry Fuseli, Max Klinger, and James Ensor.

In recent years, Swiss artist Franz Bucher, born in 1940, has produced an extensive series of paintings which he simply titles Fields: lavender, dandelion, rapeseed, and poppy fields congruent with the canvas to form a pictorial field. Yet Bucher's objective is not primarily the pictorial. Rather, it is more about the two-dimensional space which is given an inherent structure by the largely monochromatic primary colors he uses, as well as his dynamic brushstroke. It becomes apparent that most of the artist's oeuvre since the early 1970s has been determined by the metrical rhythm in his use of color. Bucher's paintings constitute actual energy fields. This new monograph offers a retrospective of Bucher's entire body of work from the vantage point of his recent pictorial fields. It thus illustrates his true artistic intentions independently of the context of his chosen motifs.