Tefaf Maastricht — Farideh Cadot Gallery — Fair — Slash Paris

Past: March 13 → 22, 2015

Farideh Cadot present, for the first time at TEFAF Maastricht, in the special curated section ’Night Fishing’, rare works by worldwide famous Swiss artist Markus Raetz. The exceptional presence of Markus Raetz, who has for many years systematically refused all group shows and fairs, is due to the very high quality of Tefaf art fair and to the curator’s remarkable selection of the exhibited artists.

Since the mid 1960s, Raetz has made a body of art which, while seemingly modest, straightforward, unpretentious, and playful, actually reveals layer after layer of complexity. Raetz’s work does not adhere to any ‘school.’ It is neither abstract, representational, nor purely conceptual. He works readily in a variety of media (drawing, sculpture, photography, painting) and dimensions (from miniature to gigantic). With the exception of large outdoor sculpture projects, Raetz works alone. The work is intimate, the means simple. His pieces are made of found materials such as twigs or eucalyptus leaves, or glass, polaroids, unprepossessing black and white photographs, simple shapes cut from tin in various sizes, little pieces of carved wood or stone, clay, small mirrors and panes of glass, corrugated cardboard, or an assortment of odd linear bits of metal. Like a poem in which no word is extraneous or wasted, each element in a piece is critical. In an age of rapid global communication, Raetz’s works, like poetry, require intimacy and attention.

For several decades, his sculptures destabilize our way to apprehend works of art. He enjoys using contrasting effects between full and empty spaces, reflection and reality, curves and countercurves, shadow and light. This search leads him to anamorphoses and mirror effects that invite to grasp how vision and perception may be ambivalent and depend on various points of view. It is the visitor’s responsibility to provide meaning to the shape that was deconstructed by the artist.

“What matters to me is people moving around the work and perceiving it differently according their positions in space.”,

Markus Raetz

The importance of movement and perspective endows Markus Raetz’s work with experimental, playful and metaphysical characteristics.

In his own way, Markus Raetz is a bricoleur and philosopher, an amorous and generous moralist, constantly busy finding ways to rework reality, without adding anything useless, but always to see it anew, and ourselves with him, and always with that jubilant surprise that time quells in most mortals. Time has no hold over his works, never exactly the same nor entirely another.

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Born in 1941 in Büren an der Aare (Switzerland), Markus Raetz is a painter, sculptor, photograph and poet. Represented since 1981 by Farideh Cadot, who has been showing his work at her galleries in Paris and New York and has curated exhibitions like ‘Markus Raetz and photographie’ at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Museum of Contemporary Art — Carré d’art of Nîmes, New Museum in New York or more recently at Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

In 1969, Harald Szeemann invites him to participate in his famous exhibition ’When Attitudes Become Form’ at Kunsthalle in Bern. He has participated in Paris Biennale 1964, 1971, Sao Paulo 1977, 1998, Sidney in 1990; and Dokumenta Kassel in 1968, 1972, 1982. He represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and has been exhibited in major museums in Bern, Basel, Geneva, Zurich, and Paris. The same year, a large retrospective was also organised by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum and at Farideh Cadot’s gallery in New York — part of the show travelled to San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art.

His works are in major public and private collections in Europe and the USA.