Manon (artist)

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Manon (* 26. June 1940 in Bern as Rosmarie Küng ) is a Zurich artist.

Life

After attending the Zurich School of Applied Arts and the Zurich Acting Academy, Manon designed the “Salmon-Colored Boudoir” in 1974 at the Li Tobler Gallery, the first of many environments in which she later used all modern media, herself and up to 60 extras in various roles. This makes her one of the first and perhaps best-known performance artists in Switzerland . After the “end of Lola Montez” she says goodbye to this art form with “The artist is present” in the form of 15 living doubles.

Manon lived in Paris from 1977 to 1980 , and has since returned to Zurich with interruptions ( Amsterdam , Berlin , New York City , Genoa ). In Paris in 1978 she turned to staged photography . Important photo series are created in black and white such as “La dame au crâne rasé”, “Electrocardiogram 303/304”, “Ball of loneliness”. These can be seen in art houses and galleries in Switzerland and abroad and are represented in the collections of important Swiss museums. There is hardly an anthology of recent photography in which these images are not mentioned.

Scholarships and studios abroad follow . In the 1980s, a break in production, which Manon now says was essential for survival, interrupted her work for seven years. It wasn't until 1990 that she designed another series of photos for the St. Gallen Art Museum , this time in color, but then turned to installation until 1998 , for example with “La Stanza delle donne” for the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa.

Her main themes today are eroticism and transience . This applies both to the photo series “forever young”, which was created especially for the overview exhibition “Workgroups 1979-99” for Bianca Pilat Contemporary Art Chicago-Milano and consists of a total of around 50 images, as well as to the photo series “Once she was Miss Rimini », which was shown for the first time in autumn 2003 and published in book form in summer 2005. In 2008 the monograph "Manon - a Person" was published on the occasion of an overview exhibition at the Helmhaus in Zurich with works from 1974 to 2008; the book was also published in English with a view to the exhibition in New York.

There are several TV films and an extensive bibliography.

In 2008 Manon was awarded the Prix ​​Meret Oppenheim .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jürg Zbinden: Manon is getting older | NZZ . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . ( nzz.ch [accessed June 21, 2020]).
  2. ↑ Christina Horisberger: Manon. In: Sikart
personal data
SURNAME Manon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Küng, Rosmarie (maiden name); Bhicknapahari-Küng, Rosmarie von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss artist
DATE OF BIRTH June 26, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Bern , Switzerland