Intoxicating Objects — Fetishism in Art

Not every depiction of the iconic scene of Adam and Eve is “innocent”. Every Judith triumphs over Holofernes in a different way. There are many versions of the “femmes fatales” in the collection of the Graphische Sammlung: Naked women squatting on the heads of severed male heads, ladies with oversized hair sculptures and Mercedes stars instead of nipples. The planned exhibition will focus on eye-catching gestures and poses from the chatoyant course of art history, as well as on an excessive display of banal objects that are both grandiose and bizarre.

Together with cultural critic Elisabeth Bronfen, we went through the holdings of the Graphische Sammlung to explore the extent to which “fetishism”, with its complex conceptual history, has promoted the construction of what is considered to be “familiar” in contrast to what is conceived as being “unfamiliar, strange and illicit”.

The exhibition will explore a wide variety of fetishistic mechanisms in the arts from the Middle Ages through Romanticism to the present day. In an effort to map the way these entail different encodings of gender and engender ever new forms of allegory, works by artists such as Barthel Beham, Wenzel Hollar, Johann Heinrich Füssli or Max Klinger will be placed in dialog with works by Urs Lüthi, Robert Gober and Sylvie Fleury.

Curated by Alexandra Barcal (Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich) and Prof Dr Elisabeth Bronfen (cultural and literary scholar and former professor of English at the University of Zurich)