Corniche

Francisco Sierra's (*1977, Santiago de Chile, CHL, lives and works in Cotterd, CH) artistic medium is painting, but he also creates drawings, objects and sculptures. His work is characterised by great independence and virtuosity of craftsmanship, but also by poetry, wit and subtlety. He puts figurative painting to the test by subverting the reality of the representational, whether with humour, surreal or grotesque investigations, or the transformative potential of painting itself.

The exhibition brings together new and existing works, including paintings, drawings, sculptures and a group of plastic works created especially for this presentation. With his works, the artist repeatedly embarks on a tightrope walk between hyper-realistic and fantastic pictorial worlds, dissolving the boundary between art and decoration. His motifs range from still lifes consisting of crockery, food or musical instruments to animal portraits or erotic absurdities. He often paints from models partly made by himself or by his children and lends banal subjects an auratic presence through the technically masterly execution and the choice of large-format canvases. In his latest paintings, Sierra creates a tricking deception manoeuvre between image and reality with a multi-stage reproduction process. He playfully echoes the image flood of the present, confuses with perplexing pictorial solutions, deceives the eye and plays with reflections, colour and form. While the exhibition begins with large-format canvases and sculptures, the works become smaller and smaller in the sequence of rooms.

Bio

Francisco Sierra (b. 1977, Santiago de Chile) emigrated to Switzerland in 1986. He spent his youth in Herisau and currently lives and works in the village of Cotterd in the Canton of Vaud. Sierra is a trained violinist and self-taught visual artist. He is also a member of the performance collective Jetpack Bellerive and, since 2018, an artistic associate at the ETH Zürich.

Sierra has had solo exhibitions at Galerie von Bartha (2021), Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2013), Kunstmuseum Solothurn (2013/14), Aargauer Kunsthaus, Kunsthaus Langenthal, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum Ludwigshafen am Rhein (all 2009). Group exhibitions at the Baku Biennale in Azerbaijan, SALTS Birsfelden, Last Tango Zurich, Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunsthaus Centre d'art Pasquart and MCBA Lausanne, among others. He has been awarded numerous prizes for his work, including the Kiefer-Hablitzel Prize, the Swiss Art Award, the Manor Art Prize St. Gallen and the studio scholarship of the Landis&Gyr Foundation. In 2011, he was a scholarship holder at the Zentrum Paul Klee Summer Academy curated by Pipilotti Rist. The artist's works are in numerous collections, including the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau; Kunstmuseum Bern; Kunsthaus Centre d'art Pasquart, Biel; Museum im Bellpark, Kriens; Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen am Rhein (D); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen or the Kunstmuseum Solothurn.

Curator: Stefanie Gschwend, Director Kunstmuseum / Kunsthalle Appenzell