Roman Signer (Contemporary Artists (Phaidon)): Amazon.co.uk: Gerhard Mack, Paula van den Bosch, Jeremy Miller: Books

Frequently Bought Together

More About the Authors

Discover books, learn about writers, and more.

Product Description

Since the mid 1970s Roman Signer's work has examined the forces of the elements - air, fire, earth and water - in a combination of performance (documented by photography and video) and sculpture (the physical remains of his acts). With a Dadaist love for the absurd, his artworks include "Race" (1981), a video performance in which the artist races a lit fuse across a field (hopelessly behind from the outset, the artist loses by nearly the entire length); "Action at Hotel Weissbad" (1992), in which an ordinary table is shot out a hotel window, the resulting photographs showing a table flying incongruously over a sleepy, snowy Swiss village; "Falling from a Bridge" (1980), in which wooden boxes are dropped from a great height into a rushing river, bursting into fragments with a thunderous crash; and "Bicycle with Rockets" (1991), the photographs of which show a fiery bicycle flying through the gallery like a demon comet. Often Signer will exhibit in the gallery the remains of an event not witnessed by the public, such as four empty barrels and a violently splattered wall, the remains of an explosion of paint in the gallery space ("Portrait Gallery", 1993), or four sand piles with perfectly round craters on each, the neat results of four fuse explosions at their top ("Cones of Sand", 1988). Roman Signer is an extremely respected artist worldwide. He represented Switzerland at the 1999 Venice Biennale and was included in Documenta 8 (1987) and Skulptur Projekte Munster (1997), among many other group exhibitions. Over the course of the past 25 years he has shown at nearly all the key European museums and kunsthalles. American venues have included the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1998) and the Renaissance Society in Chicago (1991).

About the Author

Gerhard Mack (Survey) is an art and architecture critic based in Switzerland. He has written extensively on the work of Roman Signer. Other previous publications include Art Museums of the 21st Century (1999) and Herzog & De Meuron: the Complete Works (1996, 2005). Author's residence: Zurich Paula van den Bosch (Interview) is the Curator of Contemporary Art at Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, where she organized a major retrospective of Roman Signer's work in 2000. Author's Residence: Maastricht Jeremy Millar (Focus) is a curator who has organized exhibitions at the ICA, the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the Photographers Gallery. Since 2003 he has been Director of the Brighton Photo Biennial. He is also an artist and a critic whose writing has appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues and international art journals. Author's residence: London

Tag this product

(What's this?)

Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items.