For more than 25 years Swiss artist Peter Wüthrich, who lives and works in and around Bern, has been focusing on one single group of objects: books. Examining the object of his fascination from various different perspectives, he has been piling books on top of each other, thus turning them into sculptures, hanging linen-bound books up on walls so that they become pictures, or even staging performances by carrying them around.

As Wüthrich’s chosen medium of expression, the book undergoes many a metamorphosis and numerous transformations. Despite of this, it never loses touch with its own reality as a physical object displaying printed pages and words. Rather, Peter Wüthrich’s artistic process frees the book of its purpose as an object to be read. Books become abstract paintings, installations or a medium for performances.
“The installation artist and photographer acts like a painter or sculptor, he thinks like a poet, stage-manages like a director. Imagination turns words into pictures, poems into paintings, novels into films.” [1]

The idea for the exhibition ‹Linie um Linie› stems from the events in the book: The first sentence, or it could also be called the first line. You read and write line by line, or go step by step, or build stone by stone, and so on. The current project ‹Linie um Linie› was formed from this, so that all works are directly or broadly related to this topic.
The works are in turn made using different techniques, of course with books, but also individual cut-out lines, crumpled book pages, bookmarks, i.e. bookmarkers, up to inscribed skins or old branches on which the last sentences from world literature are written.

So Peter Wüthrich tries to do quite a balancing act, which on the one hand ranges from a homage to monochrome painting to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” to Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du mal” and of course, as always, far beyond.
Incidentally, this balancing act could also mean “from the first to the last sentence”, or as Chekhov said: “If only one knew, if one only knew” (last sentence in “Three Sisters”).[2]

[1] “Hard Love: Von der Leichtigkeit des Gewichtigen” (Dr. Christoph Vögele, Director Kunstmuseum Solothurn)

[2] Quote Peter Wüthrich