With Rhizome and other installations, The Fota Gallery presents the Swiss-born artist for the first time to the Washington audience. The dynamic 10-panel Installation The Transformation of the Voice is a specific project in response to the high degree of aesthetization of Information in the printed media. As a lively example, Brunner worked with the 10 cover pages of the weekly newspaper The Village Voice during the weeks of the active gulf war. The result is a very personal chronology of pieces of Information and graphic components lined up side by side. Notions of censorship and distortion are always present in his examination of the media.

With the Crated Stars And Stripes, originally a four canvas installation with light projection made for a cultural space in New York, Brunner gets more specific about what presentation means to him and how it functions in the gallery space. The paintings remain crated, but a framed catalog documents the original piece.

This exhibit includes a piece from the Rhizome series where Brunner takes a structural approach to painting and shows great interest in multi-layered images. His work is known to combine photographic elements and techniques borrowed from silkscreening with very painterly surfaces, which invoke almost a sense of diffuse landscapes. Fragments of headlines and text are partially crossed out by photography-like birch trunks, making an allusion to nature in its most domesticated version.

Felix Brunner lives and works now in New York and Zürich. He is the founder and former director of the SHEDHALLE in Zürich, the largest alternative space in Switzerland and made noteworthy contributions to stimulate the cultural exchange between the major national art centres.

Press release: Ursula Biemann, 1991