Balthasar Burkhard

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Balthasar Burkhard (born December 24, 1944 in Bern ; died April 16, 2010 there ) was a Swiss photographer .

Life

Balthasar Burkhard was the son of a Swissair pilot and trained as a photographer with Kurt Blum in Bern. He opened his own photography studio in 1965 and was given the position of documentalist at the Kunsthalle Bern , where he photographed the exhibiting artists for the curator Harald Szeemann . He dealt with contemporary art.

In 1969 he had a joint exhibition with the Bernese artist Markus Raetz , in which they showed large-format photo canvases created with their own technology and thus caused an international sensation. Raetz and Burkhard created the Earth series , which appeared in the photo magazine Camera in 1971 . Burkhard photographed Szeemann's exhibition Live in your head: When Attitudes become Form in the Kunsthalle Bern and in 1972 and 1982 the events at the documenta and at the Venice Biennale in 1966 and 1968.

Burkhard moved to the USA and taught photography at the University of Illinois from 1976 to 1978 . Also in Chicago , he had his first solo exhibition in 1977 at the Zolla-Lieberman Gallery. Attempts to gain a foothold as an actor in Hollywood remained an episode, only in 1978 he appeared in a short film by Urs Eggers .

From 1983 he worked again in Switzerland and has now been exhibited in group exhibitions around the world. His body images were exhibited in large format at the Kunsthalle Basel , including a reclining nude over thirteen meters long. In 1990 he moved to Boisset-et-Gaujac in France and was teaching at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes until 1992 . In 1994 he had a joint exhibition with Niele Toroni at the Musée Rath in Geneva .

From 1995 he lived again in Switzerland in La Chaux-de-Fonds and Bern and worked with the furniture manufacturer USM U. Schärer Söhne in Münsingen , which led him to architectural photography. His motifs were part of the Swiss pavilion at the world exhibition in Seville in 1992 .

In 1998 the first of the large format city shots in Mexico City and the video Ciudad were made . In 2000 he traveled to Namibia , created another video there and took pictures of the desert, in 2002 he took photos in Brazil on the Rio Negro . In 1997 he had the first retrospective, In Praise of Shadows , in the Musée Rath and in 2004 another in the Kunstmuseum Bern.

Exhibitions


Solo exhibitions

Works (selection)

  • with Markus Jakob: "Click!" said the camera. Lars Müller, Baden, Switzerland 1997, ISBN 3-907044-37-1 .
  • Omnia. Catalog for the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bern, 2004. Essay by Matthias Frehner. Scalo, Zurich 2004.

literature

  • Jean-Christophe Ammann : Art? Yes art! The longing for images , Westend Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2014, pp. 94-101.
  • Eveline Suter: Time stopped, the world frozen. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . April 19, 2010 (obituary).
  • Joerg Bader: Balthasar Burkhard: Art-Photo-Graf. Translation. In: Gloria Moure (ed.): Architecture without shadow. Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo; Exhibition Architecture Without Shadow, 2000, Seville; Barcelona. Ed. Polígrafa, Barcelona 2000, ISBN 84-343-0911-4 , pp. 22-33.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Burkhard, Balthasar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss photographer
DATE OF BIRTH December 24, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Bern
DATE OF DEATH April 16, 2010
Place of death Bern