Rémy ZauggGesammelte Schriften

Rémy Zaugg (1943–2005), born in Courgenay in the Swiss Jura, lived and worked in Basel and Mulhouse. He was – as he liked to stress – above all a painter. Yet fundamental questions about the aesthetic and ethical grounding of perception – in relation to pictures, later to museums and exhibitions, architecture and the city – prompted him early on to express himself in writing. His first major project was the cartographic translation of a reproduction of a painting by Cézanne, which he undertook while still a student in the 1960s. It was an unusual form of translating synoptic pictorial perceptions and momentary observations into concepts and notations, and this in ever new attempts. There followed various occasions for collaboration on projects and joint texts with the ethnologist Jacques Hainard. After the large solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1972, Rémy Zaugg recognised a great lack of understanding on the part of the public. He subsequently withdrew and began work on the extensive, hitherto unpublished 500-page manuscript “Du même à l’incertain” (1972–76; vol. 2: “Vom Selben zum Ungewissen”) – an absorbing examination of the implicit assumptions of conventional printmaking and of the aim of deconstructing them; then, closely linked thematically to this text, the publication “Die List der Unschuld,” a comprehensive analysis of Donald Judd’s “Six Steel Boxes” in the context of the Basel Kunstmuseum. From then on Zaugg reflected continuously in writing on his own painterly projects as well as on artistic attitude and working practice. In the 1980s questions of art in public space and of museum architecture were added; in the 1990s various collaborations with the architects Herzog & de Meuron offered occasion for written and spoken engagement with architecture. Throughout, engagement with a counterpart always played an essential role for Zaugg: whether with the works of other artists (Cézanne, Judd, Giacometti), in his curatorial work for the artist Balthasar Burkhard, or in his conversations with the writer and draughtsman Pierre Klossowski, the curator Jean-Christophe Ammann and the Geneva collector Jean-Paul Jungo. The form of the conversations, including those with Herzog & de Meuron, played with the change of roles: Zaugg was interviewed by them in the classic manner, yet he himself sought out conversation and encounter with the people with whom he also realised projects. Zaugg also repeatedly chose the letter form in order to situate his reflections in communicative situations (to the museum directors Edy de Wilde, Suzanne Pagé or Dominique Bozo, the gallerist Claes Nordenhake and others). Whatever textual form Rémy Zaugg chose, questions of painting and its propaedeutic function for the shaping of the world – in the search for the unprejudiced existence of the human being – remained his defining theme.

Exhibitions:
Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, 1/11/2015–6/3/2016
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 7/4–28/8/2016