Hannah Villiger: I Am The Sculpture

01.07.2023 - 08.10.2023

Hannah Villiger: I Am The Sculpture

The Swiss artist Hannah Villiger (1951–1997) was a trained sculptress. She used a Polaroid camera to conduct a cartographical exploration of her own body and her immediate spatial surroundings and, in large-scale pictorial formats and extensive blocks, to examine both of these with regard to their sculptural qualities. In her artistic output, there is an encounter between an investigation of her own existence by means of corporeality, nature or urban architecture on the one hand, and an experimental mixture of classical attributions of genre on the other. On the basis of these themes, her oeuvre formulates a clarity, a courageousness and a poetry which today are more relevant than ever.

The Swiss artist Eric Hattan (b. 1956, lives in Basel) was invited for the selection, arrangement and focal orientation of the works on display. As both an artistic colleague and the longstanding administrator of her estate, he is a coeditor of Villiger’s catalogue raisonné and a widely recognized expert with regard to her creative output. The exhibition which he has conceived for the Weserburg lays out the fundamental thematic lines of her oeuvre through exemplary works and achieves a connection between personal and objective access. In this endeavor, “Hannah Villiger. I Am The Sculpture” brings surprising work constellations together with materials from the estate and with the filmic perspective of Eric Hattan onto Villiger’s sculptural and pictorial ideas.

In collaboration with foundation THE ESTATE OF HANNAH VILLIGER.

Curated by Eric Hattan and Janneke de Vries