COLLLECTING LINES. Drawings from the Ringier Collection

Villa Flora, Winterthur

Chapter I: May 30–August 2, 2015
Chapter II: August 29–November 15, 2015

For the 20th anniversary of the Ringier Collection, Arthur Fink and Beatrix Ruf are curating two temporary exhibitions, both focused on drawings and works on paper, at Villa Flora in Winterthur.

Both exhibitions subscribe to a broadened conceptually-geared view of drawing: drawing is not understood as a secondary medium to the work of the artists a mere preparatory sketch, but as hierarchically equal and autonomous media within which the conceptual and creative basis of an artistic position is articulated.

Many of the artists represented in the collection have explored drawn formats extensively, questioning its status and conceiving new forms of the dessin: e.g. Trisha Donnelly, who fuses drawing and video; Urs Fischer, who creates drawings in three-dimensional space; or artists like Raymond Pettibon, Larry Johnson and Mike Kelley, who work with the pictorial idiom of comics. The question of the role that drawing might play in the production and distribution of digital images is addressed by artists like Wade Guyton, Seth Price and Helen Marten.

Ringier Collection
After Blasted Allegories (2008 at the Kunstmuseum Luzern), Collecting Lines is the second public presentation of the Ringier Collection. Curatorially supervised by Beatrix Ruf since 1995, the Ringier Collection brings together a wide range of contemporary art positions in photography, video, painting, drawing, objects and installations since the late 1960s. The collecting activity, which has no national or media orientation, focuses particularly on intensively collecting groups of works by the artists represented and giving the works public exposure on company premises and through extensive loans to exhibitions, institutions and museums.

Drawings are a core element of the collection. The collection of works on paper by the early Russian and Western European avant-garde, begun by the spouses Ellen and Michael Ringier back in the 1980s, has been consistently extended over the past 20 years by collecting body of works spanning from early Conceptual Artists like John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, Vito Acconci, Robert Barry, Joseph Kosuth, or Alighiero Boetti to oeuvres by leading contemporary artists like John Armleder, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Matt Mullican, Urs Fischer, Jim Shaw, Richard Phillips, Mike Kelley, Karen Kilimnik, Jack Pierson, Joe Bradley, Wade Guyton, Trisha Donnelly, Lutz Bacher and Rosemarie Trockel among many others.

Poster project and publication
Accompanying the exhibitions a poster project is launched, which extends concepts of drawings into the field of the digitally produced image. Over 40 artists were invited to take part in a collaborative design project, producing 20 posters in a digital version of the Surrealist game of the cadavre exquis: one artist starts with a design, sends it to the next artist, who adds and passes it on to the next one, and so on. The production chain continues until one of the participating artists declares the poster finished.

Based on this poster project, a publication will be published at the end of the exhibition series in collaboration with the publishing house JRP|Ringier.

In addition, JRP|Ringier and the Kunstgriff bookshop, Zürich, will be carrying selected publications about both exhibits and the artists represented at Villa Flora.

With the Collecting Lines – Drawings from the Ringier Collection exhibitions, the Ringier Collection takes residence temporarily in Villa Flora, where major works from the Collection of Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler, who used to live in this historic building themselves, were displayed until April 2014. Villa Flora is hosting various cultural activities until the restart of a continuous exhibition activity in the near future.