Opening event:
Tuesday, 4. April, 7 p.m.
 
Exhibition dates:
5. April - 2. June 2006
 
GALLERY hours:
Monday - Friday, 9 a.m. - 8 p.m.
 
Artist's-Reading:
Tuesday, 9. May, 7 p.m.
News from the North Pole - Reading and artistic discussion with Heinrich Gartentor
 
Lecture:
Tuesday, 30. May, 7 p.m.
Visions in art - The every life of a GALLERY owner.
Presentation and discussion with Stefan Wimmer (gip international fine art, Zurich and Burgdorf)
 
 
What art is and how one can engage art into one's everyday life - these are the two fundamental topics of the Swiss artist Heinrich Gartentor.
In the late 90s the figure Heinrich Gartentor began to emerge in the international art scene. Initially as the fictive hero of a novelistic series, in which he - in forceful balance of poetry and truth - works on his entrance into the world of art. Shortly after Gartentor appears in person in galleries and halls of art. With his works he acts between art and life. As such one can bid for for a kilo of his body weight on eBay, or the artist will cleanse sent private photos of unpicturesque rubbish and other disagreeable objects on demand. At the same time Gartentor masters the strategies of art and marketing equally perfect, thus able to apply them to the aesthetic staging of his critical life experience. The artist Heinrich Gartentor is at the center of this piece. 2005 he was even voted as Secretary for Cultural Affairs in Switzerland.

In the exhibition "Aufräumen!" ("Clean up!") Gartentor demonstrates the large sized photo- series of his "Schreibtische" ("Desks"), that have been developing since 1997. Display titles such as "ziemlich normales Wuchern" ("pretty common accumulating") point at the cosmos of the connection of work and life in these seemingly chaotically placed objects. The imperative of the exhibition's title unmasks itself merely as bait for the viewer, since the pictures are actually not evidence of mess, but directions. As works of art farfetched from simple documentation they are a product of a perspective that cannot exist in reality: the depicted desks each consist of a rigging of a number of single photographs. Every detail is shown from directly above. For him photography does serve as tool for momentarily fixating depictable reality, but as artistic medium. Gartentor's desks are portraits of a new type of artist, who introduces himself as organiser of the own, an unconventional philosophy following projects.
 
Next to the series of the "Schreibtische" ("Desks") Gartentor is exhibiting his two novels "StartUp" and "Schafmatt". The OSRAM-employees can borrow both novels right off the GALLERY stand.
 
The exhibition under the theme of the OSRAM anniversary is instantiated in cooperation with the GALLERY gip international fine art, Zurich and Burgdorf
 
Biography

Heinrich Gartentor was born 1965 in Schafmatt, lives and works in Thun and acts as Secretary for Cultural Affairs in Switzerland since September 2005. www.gartentor.ch