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Campus - 24.02.2015 - 00:00 

New art works at the HSG

The HSG has received further works for its art collection: prints by Günther Uecker (1979) and Antoni Tàpies (1980), as well as The Fly Erika, a project of the concept artists Frank and Patrik Riklin (2012). The inauguration will begin on Monday, 2 March 2015, 10.30 a.m., by the entrance of the HSG University Restaurant.<br/>

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25 February 2015. The University of St.Gallen has been the proud owner of an art collection for just over half a century. It contains works by Alberto Giacometti, Gerhard Richter, Alexander Calder, Georges Braque and Hans Arp.

On Monday, 2 March 2015 at 10.30 a.m., another three works will be inaugurated: a series of prints by Günther Uecker (1979) and Antoni Tàpies (1980), and The Fly Erika, a project of the concept artists Frank and Patrik Riklin (2012). The Art Committee of the University of St.Gallen invites the general public to the inauguration of the new works. The meeting point for the tour of the art works will be the entrance of the University Restaurant, Dufourstrasse 50, St.Gallen.

The Fly Erika by Frank and Patrik Riklin

Entrepreneur Dr. Hans-Dietrich Reckhaus, an HSG alumnus, commissioned the Swiss concept artists Frank and Patrik Riklin to develop an idea for the market launch of a fly trap. The artists chose the strategy of counter-movement: the world of the flies should be turned around in their favour, according to the motto: save instead of kill. Thus insecticides were compensated for with the cultivation of insect-friendly green areas in the “Save Flies in Deppendorf” campaign. The change in the firm was concomitant with the newly created label, Insect Respect. Every time students walk over The Fly Erika, which is set in the floor, they are intended to be reminded of the significance of the alleged vermin for our ecosystem, the meaning of sustainable entrepreneurship and the potential for a dialogue between the economy and the arts.

Works by Antoni Tàpies

With a less obvious symbolic content, the two other new works of art ensure that University members’ awareness of art in their daily working lives is further intensified. The two classics are poignantly able to attract the attention of passing staff and students by means of everyday, trivial motifs – a shoe, a foot, a chair. In the corridor next to the University Restaurant, eleven coloured original lithographs have now been hung, Suite 63x90 and Initiales (1987) by Antoni Tàpies, who created his giant panels on site three floors further up, in the then Library of the Main Building, about 50 years ago. The lithographs now blend in with the building correspondingly harmoniously.

Works by Günther Uecker

Tàpies’s Suite and the 21 prints by Günther Uecker are part of a donation to the University of St.Gallen. With titles such as The Silence of Writing and Speechlessness, Uecker’s prints in the rear staircase of the Provisional Teaching Premises almost merge into a symbiosis with the site, as if they had been specifically made for it. The series consists of photo transformations produced with offset and manual silk screen printing processes, and it shows objects which occur in everyday university life: wall lecterns, tables, typefaces, reading sculptures and books. They are witness to the artist’s involvement with language and pictographs. The artist’s wrestle with language also contains three handwritten facsimile sheets and an accompanying text by Eugen Gomringer. Like Erika, they attract HSG members’ and visitors’ attention and invite them to stop and think awhile when passing.

 

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