Michael Günzburger

What do three-dimensional bodies look like when they are materially transferred into a planographic printing process? With this approach, Michael Günzburger has committed part of his artistic practice to exploring the medium of printmaking and sounding out its possibilities. His projects have included a long-term exploration of the printing of animal fur – from bears to shrews, all sorts of sizes and complexities of animals have made it onto paper via the lithography stone.

In "Chimaira", his new work for Edition VFO, Michael Günzburger prints a drink. As inspiration for his series of monotypes, he takes a chimera, which, like any good cocktail, is always more than just something. A chimera is both a hybrid being and a vision. In this case, it is a cocktail that the artist created together with Dirk Hany from the Bar am Wasser. The work as well as the drink is a mixture of several recognizable individual parts: we are dealing with a smash and shake of beet juice, mezcal with cochineal and timut pepper, tajin, jalapeno, limes, pineapple, coriander leaves and ant salt.

"Chimaira" consist of 20 monotypes. They all show a hand applied colour gradient that turns from dark green to light yellow. The pictorial space is overprinted with the remnant of an emptied drink, revealing its individual material parts. "Chimaira" is thus also a relic of what remains of the respective drink or constitutes it. The drink, which also tastes excellent, is here a constructed image that, like the ancient being from Homer's Iliad, is an artistic translation into a fantasy entity.

Michael Günzburger's works are held in numerous collections, such as the Kunsthaus Zürich or the Kunstmuseum Bern. He is co-author of the SNF research project "Hands-on - Documentation of artistic technical processes in print". His last institutional solo exhibition "Das Ende der Spur" was on view at the Hans Erni-Museum in Lucerne in 2020.