EXHIBITION

gelbe Musik
22 March to 28 April 2007

Anton Bruhin
Montblanc
Pictographs, Typographs, Drawings and a Schematoid

Opening Wed 21 March 16:30
Opening hours Tue–Fri 13:00–18:00, Sat 11:00–14:00

In cooperation with MaerzMusik | Berliner Festspiele and Galerie & Edition Marlene Frei, Zurich

Anton Bruhin is one of a rare species. He is an all-rounder – which today seems to be something extraordinary, even anachronistic, since apparently en vogue are the artists of the “overall piece”, the synaesthetes, the sonic artists or artist specialising in a certain genre. He watches, collects and rearranges, with a roundabout view of the world unimpeded by blinkers. Everything is useful. An old broken chair is reassembled and hung up on the wall, a baking grille is converted into a printing plate. Print characters are extracted from the context of written language, enlarged and examined with respect to their potential of image and object. Language, words and their meaning are subordinated to a strict pattern of antecedence and compendiums of palindromes are created. Painting, drawing, writing poetry, designing, making music are the parallel and sometimes crossing tracks of his being an artist. He switches subjects and forms of expression but remains authentic in every sphere. He is a globally renowned player of the mouth bow without any reservations towards different stylistic realms. He performs as a soloist in bands, plays the Swiss “Ländler” as well as jazz, improvisational and classical music, explores the mouth as a resonance cave, collects mouth bows of every kind and builds his own ones. The painter Bruhin paints “juicy hams from Hungary” – the ironic title of his most recent exhibition in Zurich (Galerie + Edition Marlene Frei, Zurich). Oil paintings, panoramas, always with a view on meadows, on fields, hilly landscapes on the horizon, blue skies with clouds and, of course, the obligatory bales of straw. Always the same theme, a pattern apparently, but always different. His calligraphies are sheets of paper all covered with feathery in-between beings: letters, musical notes, pictures or moving minimal objects?
As a drawer he creates ink drawings on paper, full of imagination and humour, like comics, containing undisguised allusions to other masters of ambiguity and the play with the uncertainty of meaning. “Yellow music” will show some of these drawings as well as samples of his typographies, pictographs and one very special object – the schematoid.