Fotomuseum Winterthur is a museum of photography in
Winterthur
Winterthur (; ) is a city in the canton of Zurich in northern Switzerland. With over 120,000 residents, it is the country's List of cities in Switzerland, sixth-largest city by population, as well as its ninth-largest agglomeration with about 14 ...
,
Switzerland
Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located in west-central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland ...
.
History
The museum was founded in 1993 by photographer George Reinhart, the nephew of the wealthy Swiss art collector
Oskar Reinhart
Oskar Reinhart (11 June 1885 – 16 September 1965) was a Swiss arts patron and art collector, born in Winterthur. His collection now fills two museums, the Kunst Museum Winterthur , Reinhart am Stadtgarten in the centre of Winterthur, and the O ...
. ''Fotomuseum''s exabits are dedicated to
photography
Photography is the visual arts, art, application, and practice of creating images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is empl ...
as art form and document, and as a representation of reality. Fotomuseum Winterthur is an art gallery for photography by contemporary photographers and artists; a traditional museum for works by 19th and 20th century masters; and a cultural-historical, sociological museum of applied photography in the fields of industry, architecture, fashion, etc. (with exhibitions on police photography, industrial photography, dam-construction photography, medical photography etc.). These three orientations form the basis of the museum's exhibition program and accompanying publications and events.
Together with , Fotomuseum Winterthur has been running a Center of Photography since autumn of 2003, with a bistro, a library, seminar rooms, a lounge, and a shop. On the new expanded premises, and in addition to the changing exhibitions, Fotomuseum Winterthur presents changing shows of works from its collection of contemporary photography.
In June 2023, Fotomuseum Winterthur temporary closed the exhibition spaces at Grüzenstrasse 44, unrolling a redevelopment and expansion projects. The renovation phase was planned to last from June 2023 to spring 2025. Fotostiftung Schweiz remained open.
Location
Together, Fotomuseum Winterthur (FMW) and Fotostiftung Schweiz (FSS) constitute the new Center of Photography in Winterthur, which occupies two buildings on opposite sides of Grüzenstrasse. The exhibition area is 1000m
2 and the total area (including the area shared with Fotostiftung Schweiz) is 3000m
2. The existing premises of the FMW in Grüzenstrasse 44 accommodate the changing exhibition rooms, rooms for museum pedagogics, offices, a workshop, and storage. The new building accommodates the exhibition rooms for the FMW collection and rooms for all joint functions of the FMW and the FSS: library, seminar rooms, collection storage rooms, museum shop, and the museum bistro "George" (run by Chantal Aloui).
The collection
Since the foundation of Fotomuseum Winterthur in 1993, building up a collection of contemporary photography has been a major cornerstone of the museum's activities. To date, some 4000 photographs have been purchased, donated or given on permanent loan. Every year since 2003, parts of the collection are presented in specially curated exhibitions accompanied by a series of publications (Set 1, 2, 3, 4 …). The collection can be viewed online.
The collection includes work by
Nobuyoshi Araki
, professionally known by the mononym , is a Japanese photographer and contemporary artist. Known primarily for photography that blends eroticism and bondage in a fine art context, he has published over 500 books.
Early life and education
Araki ...
,
Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft (born April 25, 1969) is an Italian-born American contemporary art, contemporary performance artist; she also works with photography, video art, sculpture, and painting. Many of her works have made use of professional models, so ...
,
Lewis Baltz,
Daniele Buetti, Larry Clark,
Hans Danuser,
William Eggleston
William Eggleston, (born July 27, 1939) is an American photographer. He is widely credited with increasing recognition of color photography as a legitimate artistic medium. Eggleston's books include ''William Eggleston's Guide'' (1976) and ''The ...
, Nicolas Faure,
Hans-Peter Feldmann
Hans-Peter Feldmann (17 January 1941 – 24 May 2023) was a German visual artist. Feldmann's approach to art-making was one of collecting, ordering, and re-presenting.
Biography
Feldmann was born on 17 January 1941. In the 1960s, Feldmann studied ...
,
Robert Frank
Robert Frank (November 9, 1924 – September 9, 2019) was a Swiss American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled ''The Americans'', earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his ...
,
Nan Goldin
Nancy Goldin (born 1953) is an American photographer and activist. Her work explores in snapshot-style the emotions of the individual, in intimate relationships, and the Bohemian style, bohemian LGBT subcultural communities, especially dealing w ...
,
Paul Graham,
Andreas Gursky
Andreas Gursky (born 15 January 1955) is a German photographer and professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany.
He is known for his Large format (photography), large format architecture and Landscape photography, landscape colour photog ...
,
Roni Horn
Roni Horn (born September 25, 1955) is an American visual artist and writer. The granddaughter of Eastern European immigrants, she was born in New York City, where she lives and works. She is currently represented by Xavier Hufkens in Brussels an ...
,
Axel Hütte,
Urs Lüthi
Urs Lüthi (born 10 September 1947 in Kriens) is a Swiss conceptual artist who attended the School of Applied Arts in Zürich. Noted for using his body and alter ego as the subject of his artworks, he has worked in photography, sculpture, perfor ...
,
Boris Mikhailov Boris Mikhailov may refer to:
* Boris Mikhailov (Comintern), representative of the Communist International to the US in 1929-30
* Boris Mikhailov (photographer) (born 1938), fine art photographer
* Boris Mikhailov (ice hockey)
Boris Petrovich M ...
,
Arnold Odermatt,
Gilles Peress
Gilles Peress (born December 29, 1946) is a French photographer and a member of Magnum Photos.
Peress began working with photography in 1970, having previously studied political science and philosophy in Paris. One of Peress' first projects exa ...
,
Liza May Post
Liza May Post (born 1965) is a Dutch artist.
Early life and education
Post was born in 1965 in the Netherlands. From 1988 to 1993 she studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. From 1994 to 1995 she did postgraduate studies at Rijksa ...
,
Thomas Ruff
Thomas Ruff (born 10 February 1958) is a German photographer who lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. He has been described as "a master of edited and reimagined images".
Ruff shares a studio on Düsseldorf's Hansaallee, with fellow German ...
, and
Annelies Štrba
Annelies Štrba (born ) is a Swiss multimedia artist, who lives in the Zurich metropolitan area. She works with video, photography, and digital media to approach her subjects, which range from domestically themed images, portraiture, and both urba ...
.
Group exhibitions
The museum is also responsible for curating group exhibitions combining photography and visual arts. Beastly/Tierisch is an example of a group exhibition, organised in 2015 and curated by Duncan Forbes. This exhibition brought about thirty international artists reworking categories of representation to examine human-animal relations, including
Katja Novitskova
Katja Novitskova (born 1984 in Tallinn, Estonia) is an Estonian installation artist. She lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. Her work focuses on issues of technology, evolutionary processes, digital imagery and corporate aesthetics. Novits ...
, Xiaoxiao Xu,
Hiroshi Sugimoto
is a Japanese photographer and architect. He leads the Tokyo-based architectural firm New Material Research Laboratory.
Early life and education
Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. He reportedly took his earliest photographs ...
, Erik Kessels,
Filip Gilissen,
Chris Marker
Chris Marker (; 29 July 1921 – 29 July 2012) (born ''Christian-François Bouche-Villeneuve'') was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and Essay#Film, film essayist. His best known films are ''La Jetée' ...
and
Charlotte Dumas, and is accompanied by a catalogue with illustrations and essays from artists and writers like Ana Teixeira Pinto and
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek ( ; ; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian Marxist philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual.
He is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, Global Distin ...
.
In 2015, Dr. Duncan Forbes established an exhibition programme that offers a unique perspective on photographic culture in the digital age. This innovative platform is titled SITUATIONS and has featured works by
Ryan Trecartin
Ryan Trecartin (born 1981) is an American artist and filmmaker currently based in Athens, Ohio. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA in 2004. Trecartin has since lived and worked in New Orleans, Los Angeles, Phi ...
,
Constant Dullaart,
Jon Rafman,
Vito Acconci
Vito Acconci (, ; January 24, 1940 – April 27, 2017) was an American performance art, performance, video and installation artist, whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design. His performan ...
and
Mel Bochner
Melvin Simon Bochner (August 23, 1940 – February 12, 2025) was an American conceptual artist.
He is considered to be one of the founders of Conceptual Art,Haus der Kunst (March 7, 2013 - June 23, 2013) Mel Bochner: If the Color Changes./ref ...
. Situations is successfully continued by current director Nadine Wietlisbach.
Fotomuseum holds an annual Forum for New European Photography, Plat(t)form. The forum was established to provide opportunity for forty-two emerging artists to introduce themselves to the public and art critics. The artists are judged by a double jury process, respectively nominating and selecting the winners.
References
External links
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Art museums and galleries in Switzerland
Photography in Switzerland
Photography museums and galleries in Switzerland
1993 establishments in Switzerland
Art museums and galleries established in 1993
Museums in the canton of Zürich