Artist: Johannes Gachnang
Exhibition title: New Historical Architectures
Venue: suns.works, Zurich, Switzerland
Date: March 21 – April 27, 2024
Photography: Claude Barrault / ©2022 suns.works and the artist
The drawings and etchings of Johannes Gachnang (1939–2005) depict fantastic architectures. Gachnang, who was best known as a publisher and former director of the Kunsthalle Bern, produced them in the late 1960s and early 1970s without the knowledge of the general public.
In work cycles such as “Die neue historische Architektur” (The New Historical Architecture), Gachnang combines parts of historical buildings that surrounded him in his various workplaces in Paris, Berlin, Rome, or Istanbul with more playful or even ironic elements. Oscillating between the ornamental and the abstract, the etchings evoke architectural fragments, grand schemes, elevations, or floor plans that continually fold out and into one another. Abstract geometric forms meet an opulence of detail to a fractal, sometimes hallucinatory degree.
For this in-situ exhibition, Gachnang’s spatial imaginings are set in relation to the historic building of suns.works’ new location nestled on Küsnacht’s hillside, a modernist villa designed by Max Ernst Haefeli in the 1930s. In collaboration with ETH Zurich’s Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), a special display of plans and drawings of the house accompanies the exhibition. A simultaneous presentation takes place at the “Periscope” of the gta Institute on the Hönggerberg campus of ETH Zurich.
About Johannes Gachnang
Johannes Gachnang (1939–2005) was a Swiss artist, curator, and publisher. After training as a structural draftsman, Gachnang worked in Zurich and Paris. In Berlin, he was influenced by Hans Scharoun before publishing his first cycle of detailed etchings of fantastic architectures in 1966. From 1974 to 1982, Gachnang was the director of the Kunsthalle Bern and left his mark on the Swiss art scene with his program. In 1984, he founded the publishing house Gachnang & Springer, which specialized in artists’ books and art historical publications. His works have been shown at the Biennale de Paris and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, among others. The retrospectives in Paris and Frankfurt honored his extensive work as a publisher and artist.
