Rolf Sachs’ week-long exhibition at the Vieux Chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland opened last Friday. The installation, presented in collaboration with Hauser & Wirth, features Sachs’ conceptual sculptures and abstract portraits on display in the villa formerly owned by the artist’s late father Gunter Sachs.
A former Swiss investment banker, the artist moved to London in 1994, where he opened his studio and creative laboratory, Rolf Sachs Fun c’tion. Working in a wide spread of fields, including sculpture, photography, and furniture design, Sachs specializes in twisting the familiar into new and unexpected figures meant to tease out “traces of life” from the places we overlook. He often infuses his work with irony and grants them witty titles, such as a hole-punched vintage garden shovel titled Sisyphus (2011).
Courtesy of Jon Etter.
Sachs’ pieces are prone to interacting with the space in which they rest, making the Vieux Chalet a particularly interesting choice of location for the exhibition. With parts of his 2012 “childhood landscape”-based exhibition “Herzschuss” (“Shot to the Heart”) reappearing here, like Bodenständig (2012) and his untitled ice pick installation, the artist creates a captivating dialogue between the location, heavy with familial imagery, and the objects that collide with it. New works include Hay Fling (2015) and Rocks (2015), both reflecting Sachs’ preference for natural materials in unconventional contexts.
Courtesy of Jon Etter.
The exhibition will be on display until February 18, and is on view by appointment only.
Courtesy of Jon Etter.
