Introduction

This year, the Federal Art Committee nominated five candidates to the Federal Office of Culture for the Swiss Grand Award for Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim and congratulates the recipients Christoph Büchel, Olivier Mosset, Urs Stahel, Astrid Staufer and Thomas Hasler on their awards.
 
Two artists whose work can be described as radical are to be simultaneously honoured with the Prix Meret Oppenheim.     One is Olivier Mosset, one of those artists who significantly influenced the development of art in the 1960s. Together with his companions Buren, Parmentier and Toroni, with whom he temporarily established the group BMPT, Mosset created uproar in the Paris art scene by resolutely and radically interrogating everything that painting as art was taken to mean. Although he described painting, then as now, as “objectively reactionary”, painting still persists at the centre of his practice. For he has remained in the grip of those fundamental questions specific to painting — for example, how colour is applied to canvas. Mosset paints against the impossibility of painting, with the full knowledge that painting is, before all else, a conceptual reflection upon art. His influence on many artists in Switzerland and elsewhere is perceptible, not least because he is always open to exchange and cooperation with artists of younger generations.

The work of Christoph Büchel is just as radical, albeit in a totally different way. With his sprawling, labyrinthine installations, Büchel annuls the proportions and identities of existing (exhibition) spaces. He combines with the precisely staged, apparently endless accumulation of things a weave of substantial indices that often lead us astray. His scenarios can be understood as spatial psychogrammes of a society that is characterised by latent insecurity and growing unease, by totalitarian ideologies and terrorist self-righteousness. Büchel goes all out with each of his projects, often spectacular in both scale and rigor. He searches out the limits of the possible and oversteps them with predictable regularity. He has thereby set an entirely new standard for installation art. Like very few others he has succeeded in challenging viewers to active participation, and exposed them to psychologically invasive situations, so that they have no other choice than to take a position.

With Urs Stahel, a person of great importance to the history of the reception of photography is recognized. After founding the Fotomuseum Winterthur in 1993, over the course of two decades Stahel directed and grew the institution into an international model for the exhibition of photography. He systematically extended the understanding of photography (that in Switzerland and elsewhere was limited until the late 1980s to a love of black and white photography) and proved that it was possible to make real exhibitions from these “flat, unhaptic products”. These exhibitions were accompanied by carefully researched publications, that went far beyond the scope of typical catalogues. Urs Stahel was consistently interested in works that dealt reflexively with the production of pictures, or with the question of the effect of, and interaction with, images. This perspective made it possible for him to conceive of a highly-regarded programme of exhibitions, in which photography of varying times and genres—including many artistic positions—took its place as a matter of course.

Finally, the Prix Meret Oppenheim has also been bestowed on the architects Astrid Staufer and Thomas Hasler. Their approach to architecture defines itself as a holistic approach that understands building, research and teaching as synergistic, mutually dependent activities. As well as the intensive architectural production in the context of their studio Staufer & Hasler Architects they undertake research, publish their discoveries in articles and teach with great engagement. At present they are teaching at the Technical University in Vienna (TUW), where they work with their method of “synchronous design process”—the translation of spatial forms into language, and vice versa. At the heart of their engagement with architecture, Staufer / Hasler stand for coherent construction that determines the expression of a building. Far removed from global trends, they draw inspiration from local conditions, and consciously explore new territory. They seek challenges in the confrontation with various materials and methods of construction, and investigate these comprehensively and deeply, in order to achieve new insights and develop new methods.

Nadia Schneider Willen, President of the Federal Art Commission