TEXTS

 

There is no truth to myself, my species, my love, my closet, my house, my valley.

 

SELECTED TEXTS ON ROBERT ESTERMANN

Elisabeth Lebovici
Robert Estermann, Blue Rider, 2007
English →French →

Daniel Kurjaković
Improper Thinking / Uneigentliche Politik, 2007
English →German →

Clemens Krümmel
ESTA MAÑANA, 2015
German →

Isabel Fluri
Modern Beach Design, 2009
German →

Susanne Neubauer
Robert Estermann, an Introduction / Robert Estermann zur Einführung, 2007
English →German →

Sue Golding
Four Horses, Four Boys and the Techne of Line Drawing, 2004
English →

Adrian Lucas
Drawing Desire, or How I Feel Much Better Today Than Tomorrow / Drawing Desire, oder wie ich mich heute viel besser fühle als morgen, 2007
English → / German →

 

INTERVIEWS & CONVERSATIONS

Ji Yoon Yang and Gregory Maass
About the Kim Kim Gallery Show with Robert Estermann, 2013
English →

Hans Ulrich Obrist
Tout est important – Hans-Ulrich Obrist parle avec Robert Estermann, about his show at Galerie du Jour agnès b., 2002
French, audio, 40 min. →

 

WRITINGS BY ROBERT ESTERMANN

Weapons of endless translating power, 2000

Imagine a place where every act, every touch would have the impact of a non-ending question; or the impact of a kind of revolution, because there would be no meta-narrative between or amongst any act. The dynamic of such a place is, physically, a history of equations — a poetics, not of metaphors or symbols, but that of the un-measurable, obscene in the hole of life.

I am interested in speaking as if stereotypes within cultural identification did not exist, I crossover, and I find sequences that differ from each other in a certain way as far as I can see. I am not at all interested in moralizing these differences. The lines in my drawings do not properly describe anything; they are rather weapons of endless translating power. I am interested in a material that is artist, freedom, time, fetish, translation.

Artist’s text for New Sundays, Galerie du Jour agnès b., Paris 2008

My works in this exhibition, my drawings in particular, are prophecies, little crystals, savant points. They read the clouds, almost classical alphabets, and then the clouds again. They believe that matter is information and that it exceeds all prophecies. They change matter through information. They have bodies of all ages, colors, and sexes.

They believe that miracles are the ordinary of the possible, and that if art is punk, it is because its happening is ordinary and miraculous, everywhere and specific at the exact same time. They also like to trick in order to survive, to fight exclusion, to play. They read the angles of the waves and surf their tunnels. They play in shapes, the ocean, and the optimism of the modern. They say: The waters of the ocean got new tastes.

 

SELECTED REVIEWS & PRESS

Urs Bugmann
Zeichnungen sind Ausbrüche des Denkens, Neue Luzerner Zeitung, 2009
German →

Judith Hopf
Best of 2013, Artforum, 2013
English →

Mirjam Breu
Vierzig Jugendliche als lebendige Skulptur, Radio DRS1, 2009
German, audio, 3 min. →

Urs Bugmann
Ich biete Reibungsflächen, Neue Luzerner Zeitung, 2007
German →

Neue Zürcher Zeitung
In der Mausfalle, 2007
German →

Niklaus Oberholzer
Luzern: Robert Estermann im Kunstmuseum, Kunst-Bulletin, 2007
German →

Kati Moser
Der Pfahlbauer, Schweizer Illustrierte, 2007
German →

Caroline de Bie
Four Horses, HTV De Ijsberg, 1997
English →