MARKUS RAETZ

February 10 - March 25, 2000, Milano


Press Release

MARKUS RAETZ10 February - 25 March 2000 Since thirty years Markus Raetz analyses the language of art and visual communication through images of rare beauty and essentiality. In his notebooks from the Sixties and Seventies he outlined his visions through precise and delicate drawings of figures, landscapes and objects cought in continuos transformation, inviting us to participate in the process of creation and making us aware of the relativity of images and points of view. Through the years the themes and ideas from the notebooks became sculptures and installations often made with natural materials, like the Eucalyptus leaves that compose faces on the wall (1982); the tree branches outlining the torso of Eva (1983), or blocks of granite scattered on the grass composing a head when viewed from a hill (1984). In some of his watecolors, sculptures and installations light itself is at the centre of his attention, like in Zeemansblik (1987), a shaped metal leaf that reflects light in a way as to create the illusion of a see - landscape; it was shown for the first time in the Swiss Pavillion at the Venice Biennale 1988. In the Nienties Markus Raetz has created the Anamorphoses: cast metal sculptures representing different objects when viewed from different angles. They have been shown in several museums as the IVAM in Valencia, the Musée Rath in Geneva and the Serpentine Gallery in London between 1994 and 1995, aswell as at Monica De Cardenas Gallery in Milan in 1994. The symbolic center figure of the current exhibition is the little cast iron BINOCULAR MAN, who looks into two round mirrors suspended at eye level in the exact center of the gallery. The mirrors turn slowly and reflect other mirrors placed in different rooms. Thus the visitor can see the works in the exhibition slowly pass through the mirrors when standing in any place in the gallery. In the rooms the moving sculptures DUO, DRAWING IN SPACE and GIROSKOP perform their "slow motion pictures". DUO is composed by small shaped iron sheets suspended from the ceiling on transparent threads. Like brushstrokes, they outline the features of two faces and, as they slowly turn in the breeze, the faces change their mood and expression. Two suspended geometric figures of iron wire form DRAWING IN SPACE: slowly turning, they seem to become ever different shapes and volumes, with changing relations of perspective. In GIROSKOP the intersection between two thin tree branches, fixed on turning wheels, suggests the movement of a dancing body. Only the two cast brass sculptures SI / NO and TODO / NADA stand still: but they make the viewer move around them in order to make him see and understand their opposite readings and meanings.