Exhibition
Silvia Baechli Eric Hattan: What about Sunday?
18 Jan 2013 – 31 Mar 2013
Regular hours
- Friday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Saturday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Sunday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Tuesday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Wednesday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 17:00
Cost of entry
Free
Address
- 900 Midsummer Boulevard
- Central Milton Keynes MK9 3QA
- Milton Keynes
- MK9 3QA
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- Local Buses: Frequent daily buses run from Central Bus Station and Milton Keynes Central rail station stops on Midsummer Boulevard outside MK Gallery and Milton Keynes Theatre.
- Nearest station: Milton Keynes Central
About
'What about Sunday?' is the first UK exhibition by Swiss artists Silvia Baechli (born 1956) and Eric Hattan (born 1955), including drawing, video installation and sculpture. Featuring both individual and collaborative pieces, the exhibition suggests numerous parallels in their work despite their contrasting techniques and approaches.Silvia Baechli works primarily in drawing and painting on paper and includes around 100 works made over the last 25 years, not previously exhibited. Her drawings are both carefully considered and spontaneous, hinting at fleeting moments or movements, often evoking bodies or landscapes, without ever explicitly stating them. They are playful technically, revelling in the unpredictable encounters of brush, watercolour and paper and the variable effects of density, light and shade. Often assembled in clusters or ensembles, displayed on walls and tables as installations of drawings, the cumulative effect is like large and disparate pieces in an incomplete puzzle.
Hattan's videos, installations and performances are similarly responsive to his surroundings, selecting and rearranging everyday items and finding beauty and humour in them. Through gentle manipulation, by displacing, folding or turning things inside out or upside down, Hattan directs our attention to overlooked details, to how things are made and to why they are there. Whether uprooting a lamppost, gluing objects to the ceiling or hanging Swiss bells round the necks of a flock of sheep, Hattan's interruptions and disruptions are the result of a curiosity and a questioning of our environment and conventions.
The exhibition also includes collages made collaboratively over the years from discarded snapshots by Hattan and rejected drawings by Baechli, unlikely pairings and unexpected correspondences humorously brought together like a game of consequences. By bringing these two artists together, the exhibition focuses on their ways of looking, with partial visions, perspectival distortions and, in some cases, optical illusions that continually keep us guessing, reconsidering and simply re-inventing the world around us.
A publication will accompany the exhibition.
For further information and details of the related public events programme please visit the gallery's website.
The exhibition is generously supported by Pro Helvetia, the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation, Swiss Cultural Fund in Britain and the Embassy of Switzerland.
http://www.silviabaechli.ch
http://www.hattan.ch
http://www.markpezinger.de
