Hans Danuser

Oeuvre

Hans Danusers work is regularly showcased in important solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad. He has been invited to contribute to international events such as the biennales in Venice and Lyon. He is one of the first photographer to have taken the conceptually compelling step of presenting his large-format tableaux on the floor in a museum exhibition. In the 1980s Danuser embarked on his cycle In Vivo, completing it in 1989. Contemporaneously he produced architectural photographs in the project Partituren und Bilder/Scores and Pictures. In 1990 Danuser won the competition for the large-scale design of the walls at the University of Zurich-Irchel, which led to the Institutsbilder (1992). He later completed another important project in an architectural context, the Schiefertafel Beverin (2000–2001). The Frozen Embryo Series, made in 1990s, a follow-up of In Vivo, also prefigured two ongoing works, The Erosion Project and Entscheidungsfindung – Decision taking.

Biography

After working in Zurich for the German advertising and fashion photographer Michael Lieb from 1972–1974, Danuser began experimenting with light-sensitive emulsion at the ETHZ Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. 1979–1989: work on the cycle In Vivo. 1980s and 1990s: working in Zurich and New York. 1986: Artist in residence in Los Alamos. Since the 1990s: large-format series of photographs as installations in space and transdisciplinary projects in the arts and sciences. Spring 2009: first Visiting Artist at the Centre for Studies in the Theory and History of Photography at the Institute of Art History of the University of Zurich and subsequently visiting professor at the ETH Zurich. Hans Danuser is primarily based in Zurich.

Entscheidungsfindung – Decision taking

The Counting Out Rhymes project on the subject of Entscheidungsfindung – Decision taking (work in progress) involves video stations and art-in-architecture. Danuser is interested in the approaches and models used in taking decisions as a social and political instrument, ranging from mathematical theory to the practical counting-out rhymes of children. The rhymes – “a mixtum compositum of reason and imagination” – are as significant as mathematical formulae and physical laws inasmuch as they are grounded in “nonrational processes of taking decisions” and therefore reflect the fundamental structure of contemporary models of thought.

Previous work

The Erosion Project

The Erosion Project (work in progress) conducts research into the erosion of natural and cultivated landscapes which takes the shape of a clear, reduced aesthetic. 'The project consists of three series: floor installations, Erosion I-VII (2000-2006); Modeling Erosion (2003-2007), created in collaboration with the ETH Zurich Institute of Geotechnical Engineering; and Landschaft in Bewegung/Moving Landscape (2008-), a collaboration with the ETHZ Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry as part of the research project Farbe und Fotografie/Colour and Photography. Earlier works were seminal to the series, specifically Landschaften (1993-1996) and the art-in-architecture project Schiefertafel Beverin (2001).

Previous work

Frozen Embryo Series

The photographs in the Frozen Embryo Series (1996–2000) have their origins in medical laboratories and gene research. These works find Hans Danuser playing with the opportunities presented by analogue photography: he takes a single negative (which he calls the “original”) and, by turning and mirroring it in the darkroom, generates from it a number of other images, which he calls “one-offs”. To reinforce this impression, Hans Danuser chose the square as format for his images, slightly stretched to 140 cm x 150 cm. The Frozen Embryo Series was first shown at the Kunsthaus Zurich in 1996. Günter Metken writes in the exhibition catalogue: “Without being explicit, Hans Danuser's work addresses the classical problem – and paradox – of painting: the perception of nature and its reproduction, the tension between surface and depth, volume and two-dimensionality, foreground and background, microscopy and totality, vision and the sense of touch. The artist actualises these issues and yet his stream of drifting shapes reminds us of Monet's Water Lilies. Our gaze wanders, roams, follows winding shapes in an ecstasy of sensual expansion and refinement.”

Scores and Pictures

1988 found Hans Danuser for the first time showing the pictures in the Architekturgalerie Luzern under the title Partituren und Bilder (Scores and Pictures), which he had been commissioned to photograph by the Pritzker prizewinning architect Peter Zumthor in 1986–1988: the Atelier des Architekten (Architect's studio) in Haldenstein, the Schutzbauten über römischen Funden (protective pavilions above Roman finds) in Chur and the Kapelle Sogn Benedetg (Chapel of St. Benedict) in the Surselva region of Canton Graubünden. The artist-cum-photographer was given carte blanche by the architect. In his essay in the book Zumthor sehen. Bilder von Hans Danuser – Nachdenken über Architektur und Fotografie, Philip Ursprung, professor of contemporary art and architectural history, discusses the impact that Danuser's photographs in Partituren und Bilder exerted on the depiction of architecture in photography: “With his photographs of Sogn Benedetg, Danuser radically altered the conventions of architectural photography. Instead of neutral documentation, he was interested in personal interpretation. And instead of reducing the phenomenon to a photograph, he as it were dismantled the building into its component parts, like a short film, which breaks the subject down into sequences and shows it from different perspectives; today one would call this performative. These fragments offer the observer the opportunity to reconstruct the building in the imagination.”

In Vivo

Danuser worked for ten years on seven series of images, which he compiled in 1989 under the title In Vivo and presented to the public for the first time at the Kunstmuseum Aarau; the exhibition was curated by Beat Wismer. Taken in Europe and the USA, the photographs in In Vivo are arranged in seven sections: A-Energie, Medizin I, Gold, Medizin II, Chemie I, Los Alamos, Chemie II (Nuclear Energy, Medicine I, Gold, Medicine II, Chemistry I, Los Alamos, Chemistry II). Depicting a variety of workplaces in research and production facilities, the work affords insights into taboo areas of late-industrial Western society without showing the people themselves. The images gauge the ambivalence of photography between documentation and fiction. The work has appeared in a book published by Lars Müller in 1989, also titled In Vivo.

Selected publications and artist books / primary literature

Selected secondary literature

Selected solo exhibitions

Selected group exhibitions

Awards

Stipends and studio awards

Film and television