Peter Wüthrich

Like seven chapters of a book, the Swiss Peter Wüthrich (b. 1962) arranges seven works in this exhibition. From a multitude of books, from their covers and individual pages, he creates objects, sculptures, wall and room installations. Through this pictorial orchestration, he establishes new references to the content of the books thus made use of.

Wüthrich has been using books as material since the 1990s. They appeal to him on the one hand because of the aesthetics and the haptics of the objects, but also because of the literary content, which goes beyond the purely informative. Wüthrich turns the versatility of this source material into formally very different works, with which he creates playful and often humorous, sometimes profound connections.

With the title of the exhibition, Wüthrich refers to the philosophical treatise of the same title by Michel Foucault (1966, English title: The Order of Things) and to Jean-Paul Sartre's autobiography Les mots (1963, Engl.: The Words) about his early experiences with literature. Neither of these writings represents the starting point of the works shown here or of his oeuvre as a whole. However, he "discovered analogies" in both books, and they have, according to Wüthrich, "fascinated and accompanied him in various ways."

Literature undergoes a transformation through Wüthrich's transference into the realm of visual art, while retaining a connection to the content. Pharmacie littéraire (2021), for example, is a wall cabinet in which a multitude of glass vessels, vials, ampoules, are lined up, probably containing medicines, liquid or in tablet form. The vessels, as if taken from a pharmacy of the turn to the last century, are labeled with authors and titles of world literature and are here part of an accurate collection of pain-relieving or even healing essences.

The titles of the nine books in coloured covers, which Wüthrich has fixed to each other at their sides in your work Essay (2022), are no longer recognizable; the books, reduced to their own objecthood, which no longer explicitly thematize the content, now fit together to form an almost square image of composed colour fields. Literary Portraits (2022), by contrast, takes the titles as the point of departure for the representation. Wüthrich has designed cover titles for 45 books, many of them significant in literary history. Here, installed in a block, the works on paper appear to us as a sensually appealing library, as a selection that serves as a visual aid and, when viewed, refers to the content of the works.

Peter Wüthrich lives in Bern, Switzerland. Since 1992, Kewenig Galerie has already dedicated several exhibitions to him at its locations in Cologne and Palma. His works are represented today in major collections, including: Espace d'art contemporain HEC, Paris, Art Collection of the German Bundestag, Berlin, Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Suermund-Ludwig Museum, Aachen, Tate Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Kunstmuseum Solothurn and Kunstmuseum Thun.