S-CHANF.- Von Bartha presents a new exhibition Raster: Grid Works from Three Decades by Beat Zoderer which explores his continuing fascination with the concept of the ‘grid’. By gathering together a number of the Swiss artist’s key works from the past three decades the exhibition at von Bartha in S-chanf examines Zoderer’s oeuvre in a new and critical way.

Eschewing labels, such as concrete or abstract art, Minimal Art, Op Art or the Readymade that are frequently applied to his work, Zoderer’s artistic style is ever evolving and hard to pin down. His exploration of the grid, whether within the patterns of the works themselves or in their holes and negatives spaces, is the only remaining constant in his aesthetic transformations over the past three decades. By combining similar elements and utilizing industrially produced materials, the artist time and again succeeds in creating something new.

Zoderer uses a range of readily available materials such as wood, sheet metal, plastics and office supplies to create his sculptures, room installations, drawings and paintings. Through a complex process of removal and addition, of organisation and re-adjustment, he explores the nature of grid systems and their faults. The artist defines a grid as an arbitrary system based on regularity which only becomes interesting when the grid’s pattern is disturbed or interfered with. Faults, omissions or chaos within the system only allow the regularity to become more apparent and effective.

Raster (1984), one of Zoderer’s earlier pieces in the show, is a grid made out of large strips of sticky back plastic. Here the artist uses straight lines and right angles in a strict square. As his works progess over the next three decades, an aesthetic shift becomes apparent towards colour and use of circles and other geometric shapes as well as the introduction of new materials such as concrete, or in the case of the most recent work on display Grid Watercolour (2012), reinforced steel. This work was created as part of a large wall installation that the artist produced for the exhibition Rasterfahndung at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany. Other works, such as Prägestück No.1 (2004) and Einfräsung Nr. 2/04 (2004) made from copper and MDF respectively, further demonstrate how the artist moves easily between a variety of materials combining order with elements of chaos to create unexpected manifestations of the grid.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a new publication with a text written by Dr Simone Schimpf, director of Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, Germany.

Beat Zoderer
Born in Zurich in 1955, the Swiss artist currently lives and works in Wettingen.

Zoderer com¬pleted an appren¬tice¬ship as an archi¬tec¬tural drafts¬man and worked in archi¬tec¬tural offices from 1971–78. Since 1979 he has worked as an inde¬pen¬dent artist. In 1995 he was awarded the Manor Art Prize and in 1998 he received an award from the Max Bill / Georges Van¬tonger¬loo Foun¬da¬tion, Zumikon, Zurich.

His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibtions around the world, most notably Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, USA (2013); Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2008) and Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany (2003). His work is held in many public collections including Kunsthaus Zurich, Kunstmuseum Bonn and Kunstsammlung der Julius Bär, Bank Julius Bär, Credit Suisse Collection, Cisneros Collection Miami Beach and Caldic Collection Rotterdam.