ZURICH.- From 19 June to 4 October 2015, the Kunsthaus Zürich is staging the first exhibition of a private collection that focuses especially on the interrelationship between soul, spirit and the naked human form. The presentation comprises over 150 mainly contemporary photographs, sculptures, paintings and videos by some 60 artists. Its subject is the human body and how it communicates with the world around it.

Love, money and power have been humankind’s strongest desires since time immemorial. All of them harbour a potential that is as destructive as it is creative. The exhibition, a contribution to the Festspiele Zürich, examines how far these three vital parameters have changed in recent decades.

THE BODY AS FILTER TO THE WORLD
In the 20th and 21st centuries, human beings have reflected more profoundly on their relationship to their environment than at almost any other time in history. Our understanding has been shaped by growing and accelerating mobility, new insights into the relationship between physis and psyche, and the novel, rapidly evolving image technologies from photography and cinema to the internet. Nevertheless, the most obvious ‘filter’ or membrane through which human beings experience the world around them is their own body – be it naked or covered.

PRIVATE COLLECTION MAKING ITS FIRST MUSEUM APPEARANCE
The Kunsthaus investigates the interrelationship between the soul, the spirit and its physical ‘protuberance’ into the world beyond it through photographs, sculptures, paintings and video works from the collection of film director Thomas Koerfer (b. 1944). Koerfer began collecting at a time when depictions of the body were still chiefly a private affair and had yet to be anonymised, disseminated and rendered omnipresent by social media. Over the last 30 years he has assembled positions from Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and the Far East. The recurrent motif linking the works together is the – typically naked – body. The particular attraction of this still-growing private collection is the film-maker’s eye, the camera exerting its power over the cut, the scene and the viewer. The selection of more than 150 exhibits presented here was made by Kunsthaus curator Cathérine Hug in close collaboration with Thomas Koerfer. It is the first comprehensive overview of all the genres represented in the collection.

FROM DEGAS VIA KOONS TO MAN RAY AND SARAH LUCAS
The artists and works from the 19th to the 21st century include names such as Nobuyoshi Araki, Francesco Clemente, Edgar Degas, Nathalie Djuberg, Dokoupil, Marlene Dumas, Jeff Koons, Alexej Koschkarow, Lee Lozano, Sarah Lucas, Robert Mapplethorpe, Boris Mikhailov, Man Ray and Francesca Woodman. While some of the works, mostly paintings, venture into the liminal world between art and pornography, playing with or even uniting those contradictory concepts, others in the media of photography and installation present objects in a contemplative gesture such as still lifes. A painting that, from a distance, appears marvellously peaceful and abstract reveals itself to be a collage of thousands of film strips, the individual images created to excite rather than nurture contemplative relaxation.

SELF-QUESTIONING: WHICH IMAGES ARE GAINING POWER?
After decades of exponential growth in the availability of physical depictions accompanied by a media-conditioned estrangement from sensual experience, there are signs of a counter-movement, in the form of a social trend towards prudery. From this perspective, some of the works may be regarded as explicit depictions of sexuality. The exhibition aims to confront visitors with questions about their own bodies and those of others. Do I succumb to the power of images? Where can I experience tender affection for my fellow human beings or an object? Whose guise would I happily slip into; what role repels me? This self-questioning and the quest for the artistic and the profane in the work itself are what makes the presentation of this unconventional and coolly, systematically assembled private collection so fascinating, for both the Kunsthaus and its audience.