Sitterwerk Foundation

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Walter Mittelholzer : Aerial photo of the Sittertal AG dye works (1935), today the seat of the Sitterwerk

The Sitterwerk Foundation is a non-profit Swiss foundation for the development, expansion and operation of a center for the arts and cultural industries . It was founded in 2006 in St. Gallen by Felix Lehner, Hans Jörg Schmid and Daniel Rohner. It operates a scientific library on contemporary art and workmanship, a material archive and a studio house. The Sitterwerk forms the institutional center in a network of artists and cultural businesses. It is financed from public funds, a group of patrons, one-time foundation contributions and personal contributions (guided tours, admissions, events).

The non-profit foundation Sitterwerk and the boiler house Josephsohn emerged from the activities of the St. Gallen art foundry. Both are two independent institutions in the immediate vicinity of the Sitterwerk Foundation.

Art library and material archive

The Sitterwerk Foundation's art library is a reference library whose holdings of around 25,000 books on art, architecture and its history are publicly accessible. The majority of the books are recorded via the Sitterwerk catalog , which can be accessed online . A large part of the book collection comes from the estate of Daniel Rohner, who amassed a considerable collection of exhibition catalogs and monographs over 45 years. Material and casting technology as well as material science form another focus of the collection.

The dynamic organization of the book collection was implemented in 2006 in a pilot project using an automatic RFID scanning and reading system. A microchip in the books enables permanent and simple inventory and provides information about the respective location of the individual books. The library of the Sitterwerk Foundation is part of the St. Gallen library network and is supplemented by the material archive in the same room.

In the material archive, different materials from art production are recorded, processed and made available in a collection for artists or architects. On the site, exhibitions are held at irregular intervals that address the relationship between books, art and materials.

The studio house of the Sitterwerk Foundation houses three individual artist studios that offer invited guest artists from all over the world a place to live and work for project-related artistic implementation. In the largest of the three studios, large-scale work of up to 7 meters in height can also be carried out.

Boiler house Josephsohn

The Josephsohn boiler house serves as a warehouse and exhibition space for the works of the Zurich sculptor Hans Josephsohn . The artist's work has been represented here by Galerie Felix Lehner since 2004. In the museum exhibition hall of the boiler house, various plaster models and bronzes are presented in a permanent exhibition, looked after and refurbished in terms of conservation. Since 2008, the work of Josephsohn has been represented in close cooperation with the Kesselhaus Josephsohn and the Galerie Felix Lehner also by the Galerie Hauser & Wirth in Zurich, London and New York.

Art foundry St. Gallen

The Kunstgiesserei is a large-scale workshop for the realization and restoration of works of art, using traditional casting and manual production methods as well as modern scanning, milling and printing techniques. It was founded in 1986 by Felix Lehner, who has been running the company since then, in Beinwil am See and has been in St. Gallen since 1994. The reason for founding the company was the contact with the Zurich artist Hans Josephsohn. The establishment of the company coincided with the decline of the Swiss machine and foundry industry in the Sittertal at the beginning of the 1980s and was carried out with material acquired during liquidation, for example from Georg Fischer AG , Sulzer AG and Oerlikon.

In 2018, Lehner received the city of St. Gallen's cultural prize, which is awarded every four years. In the same year, the Sitterwerk Foundation was awarded the CHF 40,000 prize from the Swiss Foundation for the Promotion of Culture by Civil Society: Erb Percentage Culture .

The art foundry looks after the work in all stages of its creation. In addition to classic art casting, mechanical and digital solutions for the implementation of sculptures and works of art are increasingly being worked on. For several years now, the company has also dedicated itself to the various methods of scanning and digital mold construction, has had its own large milling center since 2008, and its own 3D printer since spring 2015. This makes it possible to produce large-format objects as small, precisely shaped individual parts and also to realize shapes of any size.

Artists and works of the foundry (selection): Hans Arp , Stefan Banz , Andrea Büttner , Elmgreen and Dragset , Fischli / Weiss , Katharina Fritsch , August Gaul , Keith Haring , Pierre Huyghe , Hans Josephsohn , Paul McCarthy , Jonathan Monk , Yves Netzhammer , Markus Raetz , Sean Scully , Roman Signer , Rolf Winnewisser and others.

media

  • Fire & Flame , DCP, 86 '; Directed by Iwan Schumacher; Schumacher & Frey, 2014 ( Trailer )

Fonts

  • Ulrich Meinherz: Sitterwerk. Sitterwerk Foundation, St. Gallen 2007.
  • Anton Astrom u. a .: Archives of the future - New knowledge systems in the Sitterwerk. Conference proceedings. Sitterwerk Foundation, St. Gallen 2013. (English edition: Soberscove Press, Chicago 2015.)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Website: Swiss Foundation .
  2. ↑ Sitterwerk catalog
  3. ↑ Marina Schütz: Sitterwerk Art Library - Book, Material and Art. In: Library, Research and Practice, 37 (3), De Gruyter. 2013, pp. 306–331.
  4. ↑ a b c d Fire & Flame - The St. Gallen Art Foundry. Press release, 2014 (PDF, on schumacherfrey.ch).
  5. ^ City of St. Gallen honors art founder Felix Lehner with a culture prize . In: Aargauer Zeitung from February 9, 2018.