Peter Wüthrich
In all his artwork, Peter Wüthrich (*1962; lives and works in the Bern region) takes books as a point of departure. He got the idea in the early 1990s when he «got stuck» on a book in a Zurich second-hand store, taken with its aesthetics and feel. Since then, he has been fascinated by the versatile objects, which also reflects in his oeuvre, that meanwhile is as extensive as it is complex.
With virtuosity and a sense for the imaginary, the playful as well as the serious, Peter Wüthrich transforms books or parts of them – covers, book titles, individual book pages, cutouts as well as book marks – into works of art. He is concerned with their potential as objects, as information carriers, and with their literary content. Even if they are no longer legible as such, they are always real. The collecting of books and – in a figurative sense – of contents while reading, their existential meaning as well as the ideas and inner images that arise in the process, go hand in hand, as it were, with Peter Wüthrich’s artwork. Time and again, books from world literature appear in the artist’s works: for example, as titles on his ‘book butterflies’ («Buchfalter», from 2009), which in turn relate to the extensive butterfly collection of the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), who caused a worldwide sensation in the 1950s with the novel «Lolita». Or on the collages «Les Fleurs du Mal», since 2020, from book lines of the eponymous collection of poems by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867).
Peter Wüthrich plays with the multifaceted nature of books, the almost infinite possibilities of their transformation, and thus imbues his works with lightness and profundity, poetry and sensuality, and frequently a laconic humor at the same time. The books undergo various metamorphoses, are joined together to form abstract images, some monochrome, others like patterned fabrics, as evidenced by the linen covers. Others the artist paints over or sprays with paint, or sets them unfolded like birds on perches. Stacks of books he layers and piles up to form walls and buildings, and with others he builds houses that are also dedicated to novels and their authors, such as «Dick’s House», 2019, or «Gantenbein’s House», 2017. Sometimes he arranges the books into large-format murals or lays out floors like a lake or a piece of sky with books («Literary Sky and Its Planets», 1999; «Literary Watercolor», from 1992).
Peter Wüthrich also creates objects and installations from the components of books. Thus, ‘everyday objects’ are created from individual book pages, such as a bed, a jacket, or underwear; in addition, ‘collections’ such as a «Literary Herbarium», 2021, or the «book butterflies» cut out and folded from title pages. Finally, similar to works of Pop Art and the Nouveau Réalistes, he also applies the book titles to cans or flacons, which he lines up in ‘literary’ cabinets, e.g. «Pharmacie littéraire», from 2011.
Under narrative titles such as «Imago», from 1995, or «Thriller», from 2005, Peter Wüthrich also created several photo series or the video «Shortstories», 1999. Equally remarkable is his ongoing performance project «The Angels of the World», since 2001: In so far 21 metropolises around the globe (Milan, Paris, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Tokyo et al.) the artist ‘wings’ his protagonists – people from the population – with folded books on their backs and also captures them photographically. In this way, in addition to numerous exhibitions at home and abroad, he repeatedly takes his art from books to the people and out into the wide world.
Marc Munter 2022
