ART CITIES:Zurich-Joachim Bandau

Joachim Bandau, who came out of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1961 along with Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys and Imi Knoebel, has established an extended and varied, yet very consistent body of work since the end of the ‘60s. Slowly but surely, Joachim Bandau gained public attention, after his work had been shown widely from the ‘70s until the ‘90s.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Mark Müller Archive

The exhibition ”Dieses und Jenes” at the Galerie Mark Müller presents a selection of Joachim’s Bandau works from the ‘60s to the present day. Joachim Bandau created a series of mobile sculptures made from fiberglass since the late 1960’s. These futurist-organic figures resemble a hybrid of man, machine, and design-object and culminate in his “Kabinen-Mobile“ which he presented at Documenta 6 in 1977. In his following sculptures, he continued to refer to the human condition and form, along with Germany’s complex post-WWII re-invention. Bandau’s lacquer works and his black watercolor paintings produced since 1983 both exploit the principle of layering. For his black watercolor works, he applies washes of strongly diluted paint in several layers onto heavy handmade-paper. Each individual layer is transparent and nearly invisible. His newest groups of sculptures is called “Bagan Lacquer”, consisting of works in wood lacquered with Burmese resin and conceived as objects for the wall, the intention is to explain both the various aspects of perception, as well as the physical and visual materialization of the sculptures. These manifest themselves here in a particularly concise way, but they are also a logical and characteristic pattern of development in the overall work of the artist.

Info: Galerie Mark Müller, Hafnerstrasse 44, Zurich, Duration: 5/3-16/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-16:00, www.markmueller.ch