Le caselle di Anton Bruhin
The Istituto Svizzero presents in Milano Le caselle di Anton Bruhin, curated by Arthur Fink.
In the 1960s, Anton Bruhin (b. 1949) first began organizing happenings and performances, designing and typesetting his own books, which he self-published with Hannes R. Bossert through April-Verlag, drawing, and writing prose and poetry. It was mainly his drawings and poetry that attracted notice in the ’70s as an exponent of the nascent bohemian and contemporary art scene at the time.
In the 1980s, Bruhin turned primarily to painting landscapes and townscapes en plein air, whilst also painting interiors and portraits of friends and acquaintances. And in the ’90s, he focused mainly on music and poetry, composing palindromes and other forms of experimental lyric poetry, and devoting himself extensively and intensively to one of the oldest instruments in the world, the Jew’s harp (aka scacciapensieri in Italian, Maultrommel or Brummeisen in German, Trümpi in Swiss German). After the turn of the millennium he returned to pictorial art, painting, drawing, working on digital pictorial worlds and his DIY publishing strategy. Every year Bruhin puts together a new little artist’s book and prints and sends out a small quantity to his personal circle.
Bruhin exemplifies a generation of Swiss artists who build on the recent past, always playfully subverting it, too, and liberating it from existential pathos. Like Bruhin, they combine themes of excess and chaos with a pragmatic interest in graphic solutions and simple structural schemas. He clearly enjoys serial approaches, taking pleasure in setting his own parameters and producing visual grammars, which are sounded out, extended and expanded to explore their every possibility and permutation. Having tested such an array, he then builds another system in which to seek all the statements that can possibly be constructed within those parameters.
Le caselle di Anton Bruhin, (**i.e. Anton Bruhin’s “boxes”, “squares” or “pigeonholes”**) is to serve as the motto of the exhibition, referring to the artist’s creative approach and the various facets of his oeuvre. The show covers every period in Bruhin’s artistic career, though giving particular prominence to his drawings in digital and analog form.
As part of the exhibition there will be a media center – curated by Piattaforma Fantastica in collaboration with Emanuele Carcano of Alga Marghen – presenting Anton Bruhin’s work as a musician, through a selected discography, to emphasize the strong interaction between his visual and musical production. For the occasion Alga Marghen will present a collection of field recordings of bird songs recorded by the same Bruhin, published in an inedited quadruple box.
