Anita Haldemann

Hannes Schüpbach

The Swiss photographer and filmmaker Rudolph Burckhardt (1914–99) came to New York City in 1935 and experienced the awe that many first-time visitors to the city share. The grandeur, the energy, the vitality, the sheer movement of this American metropolis all drew Burckhardt in, and he made New York his home for the rest of his life. Equally inflecting his career as a photographer and filmmaker, the city and its vibrant cultural life became Burckhardt's muse. Rudy Burckhardt—New York Moments is a rare collection of his photographs from the 1940s and 1950s. It includes not only street scenes and details of city life—“The tremendous difference in scale between the soaring buildings and the people in the street astonished me,” he wrote—but also the portraits he made of the New York School painters, most notably Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. As a photographer for ArtNews in the 1950s, Burckhardt had an insider’s view of the burgeoning art scene. But he also recognized the limits of photography—“a photograph, when it gets printed and comes out a picture, becomes like a fact, you know”—and turned his hand to filmmaking. For the rest of his career, photography and film would work together to capture his unique vision. Including photographs, film stills, and interpretive essays, Rudy Burckhardt accompanies an exhibition of Burckhardt's work at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Basel, Switzerland, and is a fitting tribute to the Swiss photographer who most poignantly captured the energy of mid-century New York.

Photographs and Films

Rudy Burckhardt -- New York Moments

Stephen Watts

A multimedia installation meditating on the lived spaces of a legendary London poet In this two-volume publication, Swiss filmmaker Hannes Schüpbach (born 1965) responds to the lived spaces of the London-based poet and translator Stephen Watts (born 1952), described by writer Iain Sinclair as "a living ghost liberated from Sebald's fiction and granted a richly posthumous existence, as he continues to bear witness to the truth." The eponymous exhibition, a cinematographic photo installation extending frieze-like over 78 feet on view at Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts (London), is chronicled in the first volume, and a selection of Watts' poetry, translated by Schüpbach into German, comprises the second. Underlaid with fragments of poetry from Watts' Ancient Sunlight, the 24 snapshots that make up Schüpbach's frieze document the author's everyday life while also highlighting the intimacy of Watts' home as a space of making. Punctuated by translator Jo Catling's essay, this project brings together the art of poetry, translation and photography to create a cosmos of creation dedicated to Watts' 40-year oeuvre.

Hannes Schüpbach and Stephen Watts: Explosion of Words

Adam Szymczyk

Kunsthalle Basel

Published to accompany Hannes Schüpbach’s first large solo show at the Kunsthalle Basel, Hannes Schüpbach. Cinema Elements presents the first in-depth look at the visually stunning work of this important Swiss filmmaker and artist. Schüpbach is best known for his 16mm films, which have been shown at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, the Centre Pompidou, the Biennale de l’image en mouvement, Geneva, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and the Tate Modern, London. Schüpbach’s work as a film maker has been strongly influenced by his teachers Werner von Mutzenbecher and André Lehmann, both leading figures in the experimental film movement in Basel in the 1970s and 1980s. Schüpbach’s work also includes large, connected series of paintings whose simple combinations of colors attract the viewers’ physical movement in the space. Hannes Schüpbach. Cinema Elements features many large-scale film stills and images of his paintings, alongside essays by critics and by Schüpbach himself that explore the key elements of his work as a filmmaker, such as his use of montage, repetition, and loops.

Hannes Schüpbach

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