Zilla Leutenegger

Spatial retreats recurrently play a central role for Zilla Leutenegger – they are a stage and a source of inspiration at the same time. They serve as projection surfaces for memories and sensations. The staged drawings range from streets and staircases to house walls and sophisticated, nuanced interiors. The bookshelf is one of the many everyday objects that have been in the artist's focus for some time. Bookshelves and libraries have always been distinctive features of the bourgeoisie. Since the Corona Pandemic and the resulting online conferences, they have moved into the centre of digital public perception as visual background elements. Thus, this work is based on a mixture of a digital photograph and numerous painterly interventions. The rich and pleasant color palette is inspired by the film poster of the Japanese cult anime "My Neighbour Totoro".

Zilla Leutenegger is fascinated by the aesthetic feel of space-dividing and space-defining elements such as folding screens and bookshelves. This affinity leads the artist to also think of print mainly in spatial terms. Accordingly, her new work is situated in a discourse between drawing, photography, print and sculpture. The lithograph can be framed or mounted as an object to be placed on the wall. Accordingly, the artist has created an installation of printed works especially for the exhibition "Staging the Ordinary", from which the new edition can be acquired, detached and taken away in a performative act. Thus, this work is also in the tradition of her artistic practice and the previous editions, which understand works as a spatial-performative pieces.

Zilla Leutenegger is one of the most important contemporary Swiss artists; the eponymous documentary Zilla by Iwan Schumacher was dedicated to her practice. The artist has had solo exhibitions at the Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur (2021) and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2015), among others. Her works are represented in numerous collections, including the Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, the FRAC Lorraine, Metz and the Kunstmuseum Basel.

Serendipity
I always return in my mind to the many rooms of my past. Many times I have settled in again and with the furnishing and rearranging of the rooms I have gotten to know the rooms anew, which constantly change their character: In the morning, filled with the first light of day. At noon the rooms offered protection from the midday sun. In the course of the afternoon the shadows became longer and longer. Until finally evening came and with it soon the night, the longed-for silence and the time to read or draw and soon sink into dreams.
Where we live, day after day, our ideas are at home. (Zilla, September 2017)

Zilla's room: How much time do we spend where we live, day after day, in the kitchen, where we sit in the first sun in front of the first steaming cup of coffee morning after morning, in the bathroom, where we think of the sea while lying in the tub, in the workshop, where we scrub the dirt off our hands after we have patched up the world once again, in the living room, where we talk and argue and laugh with best friends, in the bedroom, where we go night after night on a big exploratory trip in the depth of our sleep. The things we have experienced there: in our rooms! They are the adventures of everyday life. (Zilla, June 2014).

The mirror as medium appears regularly in the work of Zilla Leutenegger. The artist says: "Whatever I like about mirrors, apart from their sheer sensuality, they are proof that you are still there." In "before you go..." we see a steamed-up mirror in which someone has written a message with a quick finger. "before you go..." is a poetic short story, or perhaps a detective story. Who left a message there? Why? Who is it for? It remains unclear, but there is great hope that it must be something beautiful that someone here wants to show someone before they leave...or she.

Is the portrayed person looking into a window? Is she looking in. Is she looking out? Does she see anything? What does she see? Or is she looking inside herself? The work "Mirror Image" consists of a printed mirror showing the portrait of the artist. Zilla Leutenegger deliberately chose the material mirror glass for this work. On the one hand because of its ambivalent symbolism: The mirror is a sign of vanity and lust, but it also symbolizes self-knowledge and truth. On the other hand, the mirror as a material possesses a special urgency: the viewer cannot escape a fusion with the work. One cannot look at the work without becoming part of it, without reflecting oneself in it, without seeing oneself, the space in which one lives, one's own life?