Verena Voiret

Verena "Vreni" Voiret (born November 10, 1939 in St. Gallen ) is a Swiss artist and women activist . Her focus is on light installations, building art and textile works in experimental and process-oriented creative development.

Life

Voiret grew up as the daughter of a Swiss family of ceramic artists in Zurich . After training as a haute couture tailor, she studied at the Zurich School of Applied Arts . There she experienced a way of dealing with art, in which the focus was on the development and development of individual creativity in freedom and without limits and whose curriculum could be described with the term "Free Stylistics". After completing her studies, she first worked in various areas of textile art , and since 1975 she has been developing light objects and installations.

Work

In 1964 she was one of the prize winners at the Swiss Expo . Further orders followed a. that of an abstract material mural for the Glarus hospital. She increasingly moved away from the fashion sector and turned to experimental and abstract installation art . She designed her first light installation for the eye clinic in Zurich. The light walls, colored with fiberglass and cast in Plexiglas, were a new invention in terms of idea and material and in their time ahead of the development of art. The viewer was able to enter the picture on two levels through a light reflection via the elevator and became part of the work of art. In 1978 she won an art competition at Zurich Airport. After realizing the light art, she received an order for new light object installations from the architects Köbi Zweifel , Tilla Theus and Fritz Keller. "The Blue Sail", a 6 m × 3 m installation, is still in the Zurich airport building today. Further objects were an integral part of the arrival and arrival halls until the renovation of the airport building in 2000 and are still owned by the airport operators today. During this time, she got divorced, which she lived and presented as a process with a textile project “Ehe-Baum”. The city of Zurich bought the plant shortly before its completion. The picture was never completed, the imaginary end of the growth process should have been cast in Plexiglas and solidified with cut warp threads. Today it is located in the entrance hall of the helper of the Grossmünster in Zurich. Various other works and exhibitions followed until today. a. in the Museum Bellerive in Zurich.

Teaching

Voiret gained first teaching experience in the arts and crafts school. Her first teaching project corresponded to the moment that characterizes her to this day, the inclusion of space and object in the creative process, together with her art students they completely "lismat" (Swiss expression for entangled) a room, with the result of a veiling, which reminds us of installations by Christo early today . The project was photographed by photographer Rob Gnant and featured in Swiss magazines, among others. She also received support from Hansjörg Mattmüller from the newly founded art school “Color and Forms F + F” (today F + F School for Art and Media Design ). A new era began for Voiret when she was appointed to the F + F as a lecturer. The F + F corresponded to their understanding of art; neither a work nor a process was allowed to be repeated, replications were not to be produced or orders to be fulfilled. Classes were reinvented every day to keep up with the flow and development of time. Also indicative of the process thinking, for the path that exceeds the result - so Voiret - is the fact that during this time she sold or passed on all of her projects after completion, in order to replace the conservation with a permanent, liberating new beginning to live out of nothing, the blank canvas.

Her work was increasingly recognized in the recognized art world and invitations to various art congresses and exhibitions followed. The first television set and later video at F + F were used for the work and the creative use of the new instrument was developed, the screen was processed with materials and partially covered, a staging of the medium to give elements of the film the unique meaning of the moment stylize.

Renowned artists who inspired each other grew up from the F + F time. During this time Voiret was a member of the school management. After the school split into the existing F + F and the new "Punkt G", it switched to the new foundation. After 3 years she quit teaching at the time of her cancer. Her illness and her son Noah, born in 1984, taught her to live only for the day from then on.

In this phase of life, too, she was shaped by her time in Africa. She had found access to a different intuition and a previously unknown side of art. Even after her return to Switzerland, she felt connected to the African mentality. She lived with black jazz musicians such as Dexter Gordon and Max Roach's band , who accompanied her on concert tours around the world and who inspired her creative work.

At that time and until today, their living space in Switzerland was surrounded by politically and artistically active people in one of the first and in the media as the first Swiss “left commune”, with people such as the historian Esther Burkhard , the psychoanalyst Emilio Modena , the philosopher and psychoanalyst Hans Hehlen, the architect Buolf Vital and others. Today she is engaged in building art and lighting projects with LEDs , installations, construction contracts and exhibitions.

Voiret about yourself and your work

“My work is, I create time for myself. Everything else is a task "

“I work very process-oriented, the process is more important to me, it just happens, I do something and if the process is right for me then the other thing will come naturally. The way always has to be right, then the result is irrelevant. There is no despair, because if the path is right, then it is always right "

“Art is always involving. Art is never isolated, in the end it doesn't matter what you do. It only needs the integration of art with the representational from the outside. I never think of the word art. What does that mean? It's either good, or not so good, or just fine. Art is not a word that has properties. There are things that have to be done because they are intense and have depth. I can only say whether I like something or not. What I do, like building art, are projects in which I invent something. I am a very curious inventor. It's always about life and its intensity. I constantly create time for myself by starting something, for example by producing thin tissue, because then I know that I can no longer imagine any time because it goes beyond the normal sense of time in its slowness and I create myself this way infinite time. The slowness. There must be something behind it. Because it's so intense. "

"If you have difficulty making a decision, then you have to paint. Because when you paint, you are forced to decide every half minute whether you have to choose blue or white and that is the permanent question and you will be very tired afterwards, because nobody can tell you if red is correct and if it does it doesn't count. "

Works

First phase:

• Fashionable creations a. a. Models for Globus in Zurich
• Textile art a. a. Marriage tree
• Tangled room at the arts and crafts school
• Swiss Expo as the winner
• Textile wall art at Glarus Hospital

and much more

Second phase light: light installations since 1975 development of new techniques with materials such as plexiglass, neon tubes, glass fiber fabric, laminations and colors, today LED

• Air sails with neon on behalf of Kloten Airport as the winner of the art competition
• Follow-up order for Kloten Airport kinetic Plexiglas wall installations
• Exhibition Erzenholz / Frauenfeld Amei Oberli 1996
• Galerie am Stampfenbach Leuchtbilder, art criticism by the well-known curator Ludmilla Wachtowa: "The late solo exhibition of the early starter"
• 3rd Triennial of Artistic and Industrial Textiles, Central Museum of Textiles, Łódź 1978 - Motto of the event: "Textiles - idea - man"
• Bellerive Museum: Two exhibitions on light and transparency. Zurich, Museum Bellerive, 1988–89
• 2 Swiss exhibitions on trips around the world initiated by the Swiss Confederation with light installation and a. the work "The blue mountain made of Plexiglas", Switzerland's first art with light in 1988
• “A shot of cream”, themed exhibition with textile objects galerie blau Freiburg i.Br., 1990

Further collaborations with the architects Prof. Rudolf Manz, Peter Jenni, Fritz Keller, Jakob Zweifel and Tilla Theus. Currently: Art exhibition in Zug 2010 and art in the construction of various major projects

Women's and Political Activism

Co-founder of the FBB women's freedom movement. Prize at the 1964 Miss election in Zurich with his own fashion creations. Use of the acceptance speech as a pamphlet to market women as an object "Women are not cows that want to be judged by the size of the udder, she explained to the perplexed organizers" with the announcement of the public auction of the price on Bellevue Platz in Zurich to finance an anti -Baby Pill Vending Machine. Auction carried out with media attention and public awareness of the self-determination of women was achieved. Since then, Voiret has been considered a pioneer of the women's movement and women's liberation in Switzerland, vacillating between contempt as a leftist emancipation and admiration as a courageous free artist and thinker. In 2007 the German women's newspaper “Brigitte” dedicated an article to her as an early campaigner for self-determination for women and a left-wing activist together with Gertrud Pinkus , Doris Stauffer , Hedi Wyss , Nelly Schorro, Esther Burkhard and others. a.

Other Projects

Theater work and stage design with Maria von Ostfelden , Theater an der Winkelwiese Zurich

• The Architect and Emperor of Assyria: Play by Fernando, 1968
• The Night of the Murderers, 1969
• Nestroy-Quodlibet, 1967
• Paracelsus, the city doctor in Basel, 1972
• The chairs by Eugène Ionesco, 1966
• Neumarkttheater "Ophelia and the Words" (after only 3 performances forbidden because of public nuisance)
• Board of Trustees of the Temperatio Foundation (foundation to promote and support cultural, ecological and social endeavors)

Publications

u. a. Light and transparency: installations and objects by Marguerite Hersberger, Liliane Lijn, Adolf Luther, Federica Marangoni, Paul Silk, Verena Voiret by Sigrid Barten (foreword, adaptation), Museum Bellerive Zurich (editor), publisher: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich (1988) , ISBN 390706531X , ISBN 978-3907065310

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Verena Voiret is mentioned on the museum's website (accessed October 8, 2012)
2. ↑ www.beobachter.ch: We 68ers

Web links

• Official website of Vreni Voiret
• www.bildkunst.uni-freiburg.de
• www.sikart.ch