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.

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