This volume is the first monograph dedicated to the work of the Swiss artist Anne Pantillon, and it collects all of her serial works and the results of her research since the Aughts. Over 200 photographs will allow readers to discover the different phases in Pantillon’s production, each defined by its own specific gesture and process. In fact, throughout her career, Pantillon has conducted countless aesthetic experimentations, passing from realism to abstraction and from abstraction back to realism with disconcerting ease. At the same time, her multifaceted oeuvre is a demonstration of her skill, as she employs a variety of techniques, including watercolor, drawing, Indian ink, oil paint, and engraving.
For her most recent series, Oscillographies, Pantillon abandoned her brush to paint with “elbows and forearms,” rallying all of her physical energy to create intensely vibrant works.
However, it is equally important to observe that this artistic production is characterized by the presence of certain themes that make for overall coherence, such as the study of both wild and urban nature, the observation and the depiction of movement, and the relationship between painting and music.
The volume is complemented by texts by Nathalie Chaix, director of the Musée Jenisch in Vevey; Corinne Currat, assistant curator of the Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lausanne; and by Pierre Fankhauser, a writer and translator, whose poetry collection La visée Anne Pantillon illustrated.
Nathalie Chaix directed several cultural institutions and museums in the Canton of Geneva, and since 2019 she has been at the helm of the Musée Jenisch Vevey, the second art museum in the Canton of Vaud. She is a novelist as well as a writer on the subject of art history.
Corinne Currat is assistant curator of the Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lousanne, and has been the curator and coordinator of several projects, among which an important retrospective on Hans Emmenegger (1866–1940) in 2021.
Pierre Fankhauser is a writer, translator, and professor at the Swiss Literature Institute in Bienne, as well as a writing consultant. After spending seven years in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he published two novels, Sirius and Bergstamm, as well as three translations: the novels Veneno and Ruptures by the Argentinian Ariel Bermani, and a poetry collection, Abécédaire, by the Chilean poet Pablo Jofré. He was awarded the Prix Tirage Limité for his poetry collection, La visée.
David Lemaire is a Swiss art historian. Since 2018 he has directed the Musée des beaux-arts in La Chaux-de-Fonds.
