Markus Weggenmann: Tribute to the Stripes, 1996,
Sammlung Deutsche Bank, © Courtesy Galerie Mark Müller, Zürich/Markus Wegenmann

In recent years it has become difficult to see much in the way of unique national features in the Swiss art scene. On the contrary, the discernible dominance of a specific tendency in the homeland of concord and conciliation would immediately provoke mistrust. In Switzerland, a phenomenon like the Young British Artists – a homogeneous grouping that aimed for shock effect and almost exclusively shaped the image of British art in the nineties – would soon be reproached for its one-sidedness. Contemporary Swiss art is positioned in an international context rather a Swiss perspective, as shown by a brief glance at the grant catalogue for Swiss artists: every year the cities of Bern and Zurich provide two artists with studios that are located not in Geneva or elsewhere in francophone Romandie, and not in Lugano either, but in the artistic melting pot of New York. The city of Lucerne maintains an artists' studio in Chicago, the city of Zug has one in Berlin, and the Art Board of the canton of Aargau sends its scholarship recipients to Paris. The Zug machine construction firm Landis & Gyr offers Swiss creative artists five residences and studios in London, while the Swiss cultural foundation Pro Helvetia even offers three temporary studios in Cairo, among other places.


Andre Thomkins: backboard - bockbart, 1973,
Deutsche Bank Collection, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2003

One artist who has always seen himself as operating in the charged atmosphere of transborder exchange is Balthasar Burkhard (*1944 Bern), who now lives in France. The Bern artist works primarily in the medium of photography, but the lobby of the Deutsche Bank's Zurich headquarters showcases not only large-format black and white photographs, but also one of Burkhard's few installations. Burkhard completed the work, entitled Durchleuchtung (X-Ray) in 1994, as the winner of a competition for art in the public arena announced by the Deutsche Bank when it moved into its present building. It consists of ten ceiling-high, translucent frosted glass panels mounted behind the glass façade of the lobby that opens onto Zurich's busy Bahnhofquai. Like x-ray images, they are lined up in rank and file, with the flood of daylight revealing monumental whorls and spirals etched into the frosted glass. The lightbox on which x-rays – or photographic negatives – are usually viewed is replaced by a natural light-space: groups of passersby hurry past the window front on the sidewalk and inscribe themselves into Burkhard's "x-rays", if only for a brief moment, as spectral as the fossils.