Art@Tell: art at Tellstrasse

20 November 2013. In its newly acquired building in Tellstrasse 2, the University of St.Gallen provides international artists who do not enjoy any permanent commercial support by galleries or art consultants with an opportunity to present their work in a rotation of six to twelve months. The artists were addressed through art platforms and artists’ cooperatives throughout the world. Within only one month, 700 applicants from a wide variety of cultural areas on five continents submitted their projects.

700 applicants from all over the world
In New York alone, there are more than 400 artists with a promising body of work of recognisable merit who have not yet achieved a breakthrough on the art market but are partially organised in cooperatives. The art-in-architecture collection on the HSG campus offers these emerging artists a platform for their talent. The selection concentrates on paintings, photographs, video films and sculptures. With works by Calder, Arp, Giacometti, Miró, Richter, Burckhardt, Tàpies, Disler and others, the HSG owns a collection that would be a credit to any museum. The picture gallery provides an impression of this.

“Mentor” by Savanna Barrett
In the 2013 painting “Mentor “ by Savanna Barrett, the paint as picture material and the colours as conveyors of expression fuse into a unit. Layer by layer, the powerful paintwork occupies the entire canvas. Through the application of paint and the strong, rough brushstrokes, the painting acquires volume and has a three-dimensional and immediate effect. The deep colours emerging from the canvas, the light reflexes and the subtle play of shades generate an atmospherically dense image space.

Blurred contours provide an impression of stones placed one on top of the other. Thus the painting, which is situated between figurative and abstract art, invites onlookers to an associative game: the structure of stones on top of each other may be interpreted as a landmark for the educational journey undertaken by the students who come here and then leave again.