curated by Sabine Schaschl and Evelyne Bucher

October 27, 2022 – January 15, 2023

This fall, Museum Haus Konstruktiv is exhibiting Yves Netzhammer (b. 1970 in Affoltern am Albis, lives and works in Zurich) – one of the highest-profile Swiss artists of his generation.

Yves Netzhammer’s installations are based on computer animations, which he presents in a site-specific manner, with objects, drawings and murals, creating sophisticated multilayered environments. The resulting poetic visual worlds are indebted to both figuration and non-representational form: They contain anonymous figures without face or gender, animals, insects and other enigmatic beings, as well as reduced formal elements that enable references to surrealism and constructivism. This artist is always concerned with moments of empathic perception, which his peculiar creatures’ actions trigger in the audience.

Yves Netzhammer first addressed Russian constructivism in 2015, when he participated in the Kiev Biennial. In the multimedia installation The Saw’s Child is the Board, consisting of a video triptych, a mural showing black rectangles, and a web of black-and-white painted wooden slats, the sober language of digital media meets the formal aesthetic vocabulary of the 1910s and 1920s. In 2016, Netzhammer adapted the installation for his room-filling intervention in the exhibition Thinking Outside the Box at Museum Haus Konstruktiv and supplemented it with selected works from the collection. Netzhammer has now been invited by the museum to again engage with the heritage of constructivist-concrete and conceptual art, which constitutes the thematic cornerstone of our establishment.