Ardentis ART – Gilles Furtwängler (1982) lives and works in Johannesburg (ZA) and Lausanne.
A graduate of the Lausanne School of Art (ECAL) in 2006, he has since pursued work based on communication. Everything is shaped to create an objective and abstract, ironic and moral, yet ultimately poetic form of communication.
He has participated in numerous exhibitions and presented many readings and performances in institutions and art spaces in Switzerland and abroad.
A member of the Circuit art center in Lausanne and the Makrout Unité collective, he received a Swiss Art Award and the Irène Reymond Prize in 2015. He also won the Quark Prize in 2014 as well as the ProLitteris Encouragement Prize in 2013. In 2016, he was awarded the art grant from the canton of Vaud.
A first monograph on his work was published in the Cahier d’artiste collection by Pro Helvetia in June 2017, and a second one in 2018, in the Minimono collection from Edizioni Periferia, Lucerne/Poschiavo.
For the Ardentis dental clinic in Lausanne Flon, Gilles Furtwängler presents “Hey actually, I really like your Skype profile picture,” a selection of posters and paintings on paper created between 2013 and 2018.
The printed and painted texts consist of personal writings and phrases overheard on the street as well as in various conversations. Other sentences come from media, especially magazines dealing with economics, psychology, and sociology.
“The basis of the texts and words I use is a mix of personal writings and found phrases. The main theme of all my texts could be banality — this banality that unites us, that makes us alike, that levels hierarchies, that brings together art and surgery, art and Swedish massage, art and global debt, global debt and plumbing, plumbing and well-being, well-being and Formula 1, Formula 1 and geopolitics.
To catch the viewers by talking about love, abstraction, and landscape, to hold them with concepts, morality, politics, and to let them go with impulses, privileges, and everyday life.”
To be discovered without moderation until May 11, 2019, at the Ardentis dental clinic Lausanne Flon, Voie du Chariot 6, 1003 Lausanne, during opening hours: Monday to Friday 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday and public holidays 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Free entry.
