CURA.

With Hannah Villiger – Works/Sculptural, Istituto Svizzero presents the first major solo show of the Swiss artist Hannah Villiger (1951–1997) in Italy. The exhibition spans all of the artist’s creative phases, placing a special focus on the works Hannah Villiger created during her residency at Istituto Svizzero in Rome in the mid-1970s. In addition, a selection of the artist’s work diaries is presented for the first time, as well as other previously unpublished photographic material.

Following her first photographs and objects in the 1970s, Hannah Villiger becomes known for her large-format photographs in the late-1980s. These consist mainly of fragmentary close-ups of her naked body, taken with a Polaroid camera, then enlarged via an intermediate negative, and mounted on thin aluminium plates, which are presented individually or in large, block-like arrangements, depending on the exhibition space. Photography is Hanna Villiger’s medium, the camera her instrument. Yet she describes herself as a sculptor. Initially she refers to her photographs as ‘Arbeit’ (Work). But starting around 1983, she begins calling them ‘Bildhauerei’ (Sculpting) and then ‘Skulptural’ (Sculptural)—the latter a term she also sometimes uses as the title of her exhibitions. “I am the sculpture,” she notes in her work diary in 1983.

On the one hand, Hannah Villiger’s body images are in the tradition of introspective work in the studio, where the artist confronts materials and things that are readily available—often one’s own body. In Bruce Nauman’s work from the late- 1960s, for example, he performs before the camera in his studio, carrying out movement sequences and playing games according to self-imposed rules. On the other hand, Hannah Villiger’s work can also be viewed in the context of the artistic self-portraits from the 1970s and 1980s—such as works by Urs Lüthi or Cindy Shermann. However, Hannah Villiger is less interested in the moment of ironic self-staging or in the media’s and society’s grip on the (female) body, than in its actual plasticity. Her own body serves as a material which she works with like a sculptor—shaping, deforming, and depicting it in sections. The body also sets the parameters for her visual creations: “The greatest distance between camera and body part is the length of my outstretched arm to my toes,” writes the artist in a text from 1986 about her book Neid (Envy), which was published on the occasion of her solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel.

The large two-part works on display in Room 1—both titled Sculptural and realised in 1996 and 1995/95—were produced for the first time and specifically for this exhibition, based on Hannah Villiger’s original Polaroids. Not all of the depicted body parts are easy to decipher. We can recognize a hand clenched into a fist, toes, fingers, hair—shaped by light and shadow. In these two works from the 1990s, the skin pales in the cold light, a white surface that is barely recognizable. In contrast, in Sculptural (1984/85) we see a skin surface that is bathed in warm light. The works convey a strong sense of the sculptor’s gaze and methods. What interests Hannah Villiger are surfaces, volumes, and space. Using the two-dimensional medium of photography she generates a sense of plasticity. Pigment spots, hollows, and wrinkles form a landscape, a sort of body topography. The skin—the largest sensory organ in the human body—is all too present as a surface, the outermost shell of the body, an interface with the world. It becomes the actual skin of the picture, as Claudia Spinelli notes in her essay for the 2001 catalogue raisonné of Hannah Villiger’s work. At the same time the artist complements the view of her own body— the view inwards—with views outwards: views out of the window or from the balcony of her apartment or studio. What seems at first glance to be a contrasting work from around the same time is in fact based on similar principles: just as the artist scans her skin with the camera, looking at her body, she also looks at a tree. From the balcony, the tree (1984/85) takes a perspective that is reserved for her alone—making it equally private. The surface structures of skin and tree, respectively, become landscapes all their own.

Hannah Villger arrives in Rome in the autumn of 1974. At just 23 years old, she is already considered a shooting star in Switzerland. She lives and works at Istituto Svizzero until the summer of 1976. Then she rents a flat in Trastevere, and after that she moves to Montefalco in Umbria, where she remains until September 1977. In Rome, the young artist encounters a new environment that differs in many ways from Switzerland, which is still quite conservative at the time. Pasolini is in town, and Janis Kounellis had already exhibited live horses at the renowned Galleria L’Attico in 1969. Rome is an escape for Hannah Villiger, according to her friends. Her work gains in complexity through her encounters with Land Art and Arte Povera, which is very present in Rome at the time. As she did as a student at the School of Applied Arts in Lucerne, she works with drawings, sculptural objects, and photography. The outlines of hands often feature in her drawings. She creates small objects from feathers and twigs, she sews plant leaves into her work diary. And she develops powerful, spear-like creations from branches, palm fronds, and string, staging them in the garden of Villa Maraini and posing with them on the terrace of the annex. “I am an Amazon,” Hannah Villiger records in her work diary alongside a sketch of the spear objects.

In 1976, at an exhibition in Bevagna in Umbria, she shows a kind of giant Mikado game with huge, pointed sticks. During her stay in Rome, Hannah Villiger’s photographic work becomes increasingly distinctive. The artist tosses burning palm fronds from the terrace of Villa Maraini, photographing them as they fell to the ground. She begins staging her objects exclusively for her camera, capturing the ephemeral events as a moment in time. The idea of photography as a sculptural medium, which will shape Hannah Villiger’s entire future oeuvre, is brewing in Rome.

In her early photographs, Hannah Villiger frequently takes photos of things flying through the air. “Wherever you look, that’s where you’ll fly,” she notes in her work diary in April 1976. Here, too, it is the very moment of movement and the simultaneous transience of the visual motif that interests her. The artist arranges photographs of an advertising blimp hovering in the sky over Rome (Work from 1976) as a triptych, a three-part set, which breaks with the static nature of photography. In Work (1979)—one of the first colour photographs in her oeuvre—she captures an airplane’s fading contrail. She photographs flocks of birds, footballs, and airplanes taking off and landing at Fiumicino airport. The images emerge from her confrontation with the everyday, immediate world, with the vivid reality all around her. It is worth noting that Hannah Villiger does not enlarge and exhibit every image that she takes. Many of her motifs exist only as small prints, bearing witness to traces and topics that capture the artist’s fascination.