In summer 2010 the New York artist F. P. Boué was a guest in the studio of the Sitterwerk for three months. He was preparing for an exhibition that he presented in February 2011 at Participant in NY.
In his works, F. P. Boué cautiously approaches things in our surrounding. He explores everyday architectonic details and common objects of everyday use as respectfully as incunabula of the history of architecture or civil engineering. Observers of his artistic attempts become attentive to subtleties, which first have an effect as a result of repeated approaches to an object. In short super-8 films, he thus explores in many, often similar settings—interrupted by black frames—an engineering masterpiece such as the Schwandbach Bridge by Robert Maillart, or also everyday occurrences such as how several individuals pull a transport crate up through the dark stairway of an apartment building in New York using a cable winch. Through such processes, he seeks to reclaim monuments from oblivion in that he points out their significance and also opens up new significances by means of associative references and plays on words. It is, therefore, also not surprising when he in conversation suddenly reinterprets the film projection device as the valley station of that cable car that brings him over a breathtaking abyss to the Albigna dam wall—another «monument» in concrete. The artist, in the end, also expands the concept of the monument itself when he, in an unfinished drawing, strives to record not Nietzsche's house but rather the dream recall of the both sensitive and artistic philosopher.
Open Studio
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
starting at 6pm