With Alex Demaremels, Andrea Muheim, Bernadette Gruber, Chantal Michel, Conradin Stiffler, Helena Wyss-Scheffler, Joeggu Hossmann, Jorge Mayet, Marlis Spielmann, Patrick lo Guidice, Rosemary Bauer-Singleton, Verena Guther

With Alex Zwalen, Christian Eberhard, Conrad Meier, Esher Schena, Michael Flückiger, Nicolas Bischof, Pia Valär

Guest artists: Andrea Muheim, Andreas Niederhauser, MArkus Bösch, Silvia Popp

Concept and organization: Andrea Muheim and Franziska Stern-Preisig

The «Salon der Gegenwart» is a loose group of artists who engage with figurative painting and exhibit in changing formations. Participating in the Salon at Villa Renata in Basel are Urs Aeschbach, Stefan Auf der Maur, Anton Bruhin, Samuel Buri, Renate Bodmer, Bendicht Fivian, Corinne Güdemann, Dieter Hall, Robert Honegger, Georgine Ingold, Vincent Kriste, Rosina Kuhn, Andrea Muheim, Ercan Richter, Giampaolo Russo, Karoline Schreiber and Kaspar Toggenburger.

The renowned Swiss artist Andrea Muheim has been painting people for over 25 years and has made a name for herself as a nuanced and accomplished portrait painter, among other things. In her latest works, the people in her paintings show themselves in a process of movement. They are full of dynamism and evoke that feeling of freedom. Years of engagement with dance and rhythm have led Muheim into a new, painterly, and multifaceted dimension.

The looser brushwork is the painterly response to the search for freedom and also lends Andrea Muheim's paintings a new dynamism, which finds its counterpart both in the captured movement of the people in the paintings and in her still lifes, with which she is also intensively engaged.

The working pace has become faster. Contours are blurred and dissolve, people become shadow figures in backlight, lose their faces, recede into the distance, and are only recognizable as such from close up.

With Tonjaschja Adler, Gabriela Brühwiler, Eva Bertschinger, Kurt Caviezel, Teresa Chen, Gianin Conrad, Regula Dettwiler, Dagmar Heinrich, Benjamin Egger, Susanne Hofer, Esther Kempf, Pascal Lampert, Mickry 3, Andrea Muheim, Georgette Maag, Andreas Marti, Pat Noser, Paul Sieber, Esther Schena, Martin Senn, Tatsuto Suzuki, Sandro Streudler, Eri Székely, Ana Strika, Sebastian Sieber, Verena Vanoli, Nina Weber

This exhibition brings together two contemporary positions in landscape painting, which simultaneously contrast with historical paintings. A selection of oil paintings by unknown painters from the late 19th to mid-20th century are provided on loan by antiques dealer Charles Beusch from the St. Gallen Rhine Valley. Also from the Rhine Valley comes Adrian Scherrer and his mountain landscapes captured from a bird's eye view. The view from above allows an unusual overview and a distance, which is then suspended or broken again in the abstractions of the more recent works. Andrea Muheim's landscapes, on the other hand, are mood paintings, often captured in twilight, when the visible gives way to the felt. Her focus is on light, which takes on a sensual, almost tangible quality in her oil paintings.

Konzept: Giampaolo Russo
Kuratiert von Medea Hoch und Bettina Kaufmann

MIt Ercan Richter, Giampaolo Russo, Rosina Kuhn, Andrea Muheim, Bendicht Fivian, Corinne Güdemann, Robert Honegger, Anton Bruhin, Dieter Hall, Stefan Auf der Maur, Karoline Schreiber, Velimir Ilisevic

(…) Der Begriff Malerei leitet sich vom althochdeutschen Substantiv «mal» ab, das Flecken bedeutet. Walter Benjamin bezeichnet das Medium der Malerei in einem Aufsatz von 1917 denn auch als «das Mal im engeren Sinne», das hervortrete und die Dinge irgendwie enthalte. Diese Sinnlichkeit und ihre inhärente Langsamkeit scheinen der Malerei angesichts der Flut von lichtschnellen digitalen Bildern eine neue Modernität zuzuweisen. (…)

Aus der Eröffnungsrede von Medea Hoch und Bettina Kaufmann, Kuratorinnen

The exhibition «Vo Berg und Tal» primarily shows current works by the painter. They are moods of twilight, people are absently present in these landscapes; often the subject refers to their traces: the house, the power pole, the chimney, a fence.
As counterpoints to these are earlier works that appear lighter, more concrete, and more narrative: grazing animals, helicopters, cats, rabbits, children, a tub on the alp.

Andrea Muheim's painting opens up a view that becomes effective above all energetically: rocky, cool, still, sometimes lost and yet not, colorful and rich, lively and blooming.
Grass and animal, fog, clouds, rock and light. A small journey through landscapes, inside and outside.

Melanie Grütter, author

Concept Giampaolo Russo
Curated by Simone Toellner and Jacqueline Weiss

With Ercan Richter, Giampaolo Russo, Rosina Kuhn, Andrea Muheim, Bendicht Fivian, Corinne Güdemann, Martina von Schulthess, Robert Honegger, Werner Ignaz Jans, Anton Bruhin, Dieter Hall, Stefan Auf der Maur

Will – courage – patience – perseverance»: Had the initiator and artist of the exhibition, Giampaolo Russo, not possessed all four qualities, we would not be here today. A great deal has happened since the idea and the first meeting of the «Salon der Gegenwart» Zurich at the end of 2014.

From the opening speech by Simone Toellner, co-curator

By Yvonne Türler-Kürsteiner

Baratti, Chipilo, Puerto Vallarta and Favignana are some of the titles of Andrea Muheim's latest works. They refer to beaches far from Muheim's life and work center in Zurich's District 4 and could suggest an irrepressible wanderlust on the part of the artist. But this is not the case. Not out of personally motivated wanderlust, but rather by chance, sometimes even quite reluctantly, she ended up on the Aegadian Islands or in Mexico… It was worth it in any case. The photos she took here and there serve her – sometimes even years later – as templates and an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Some of them were black and white, others in color. She adheres to this in her painterly execution as well. At least that's what one thinks at first glance. Upon closer inspection, however, colors emerge even from the brightest whites or the darkest blacks. Delicate orange or blue tones push to the surface. They are what immerse Muheim's motifs in that mysterious light so characteristic of the mood in her paintings. "Dark colors are indeed typical of my work and certainly have a melancholic component. But I am by no means melancholic, quite the opposite. In contrast to dark colors, the light simply comes into its own much better," says Andrea Muheim. And that is what she is after. Light is her great passion. This is where the artist focuses her attention – in life, when photographing, and in painting.

This was already the case in her cityscapes and landscapes. They thrive on the diffuse, mostly nocturnal play of light, which occasionally takes on a life of its own to such an extent that the motif is outshone and dissolved by the light's own momentum. People are hardly visible in them. In the current works, this is different, but not fundamentally new. Andrea Muheim has been painting people for over 20 years and has made a name for herself as a nuanced and accomplished portrait painter, among other things. What is new, however,
is that the people in her paintings are no longer in interior spaces but outdoors, on wide beaches. They evoke that feeling of freedom and connection with nature that humanity has always longed for and which holds a firm place in the iconography of European art history.

And the looser brushwork is also new. It is the painterly response to the search for freedom and also lends Andrea Muheim's paintings a new dynamism, which finds its counterpart both in the captured movement of the people in the paintings and in the wildly churning masses of water. The working pace has become faster. Contours are blurred and dissolve, people become shadow figures in backlight, lose their faces, recede into the distance, and are only recognizable as such from close up. No longer identifiable, relatives and acquaintances from Andrea Muheim's photo albums become anonymous staffage figures in her paintings, which allow the grandeur of nature to stand out all the more clearly, or become symbols of the human dialogue with nature itself, perhaps also figures of identification for the viewer's own feelings and longings. That, at any rate, would be entirely in the spirit of the artist.

Although Andrea Muheim, as in earlier work cycles, also bases these new works exclusively on her own photographs, she seems to be increasingly distancing herself from the photographic source.
In the foreground are the liberated painterly gesture and the accompanying mood, which oscillates between setting off for new shores and being at one with oneself and nature.

Quest of Freedom – the search for freedom. This is an act of liberation that takes place on various levels. On Andrea Muheim's very personal level, because her son has become independent, is going his own way, and thereby opens up new possibilities for her as a woman and artist; on the level of motif, because the people in the paintings are released from confining architecture into the open nature; on the painterly level, which manifests itself in the freer gesture and the increasing detachment from the photographic source; and finally on the metaphorical level, because it is about more than reproducing holiday memories at well-known bathing beaches. Baratti, Chipilo, Puerto Vallarta, or Favignana are interchangeable destinations. They become metaphors for an attitude toward life that is not oriented to geographical coordinates and is bound neither to specific people nor to time. It can arise anytime and anywhere, even in Zurich's District 4.

Embroidery? What does this old-fashioned handicraft have to do with the modern art world? Quite a lot, says Elke Priess, and presents very different exciting works in the Steintorviertel that «appear delicate but provoke resistance and wildness, that also stand for a slowing down of everyday life through a technique of concentration and reduction».

16 female artists from Germany and Switzerland show works ranging from handmade cross-stitch to machine embroidery tangles, with individually diverse approaches in content as well: Alexandra Knie from Paderborn embroiders viruses, Victoria Martini from Munich media stars, Dina Rautenberg from Darmstadt insects, Andrea Muheim from Zurich diary notes; Bremen artists are also represented: Anja Fußbach, Sabine Hanke, and Silke Mohrhoff, as well as the gallerist herself, who was curator of the Cuxhaven Kunstverein for several years.

glucke-magazin.de

Curated by Zurich gallerist Silvio Baviera
50 artists, writers, musicians from Zurich's District 4

To show the Aussersihl/Zurich quarter from a different side is in the air due to its impulsive field of tension. The historical and creative potential seems almost immeasurable. The research makes this clear. The melting pot of District 4 integrates without pressure to assimilate. A happy mixture of the familiar and the foreign without a conductor's baton. The magnets of morality and freedom know each other. They greet one another without suppressing the conflicts. You will notice that «the shattered quarter» does not explicitly have to offer a meandering red-light mile – the flotsam or the ambush of disappointments.

With Renate Bodmer, Bendicht Fivian, Corinne Güdemann, Andrea Muheim, Ercan Richter, Giampaolo Russo, Kaspar Toggenburger, Alex Zwalen

With Andreas Muheim, Vera Ida Müller, Sebstian Sieber

With Anaïs Gumy, Georgine Ingold, Olaf Quantius, Thomas Hauri, Andrea Muheim, Monika Ruckstuhl, Klodin Erb, Lena Eriksson, Karin Schwarzbek, Indra

Hangart-7 Edition 9 Switzerland