Gerwald Rockenschaub: Swing

With Gerwald Rockenschaub, Kunsthalle Bern is putting into the spotlight a pioneer of the crossover of pop, design and club culture who has revolutionised traditional concepts of art. In this book, Gerwald Rockenschaub introduces the reader to his works created since 2005. He presents 33 installations in chronological order: shows in galleries, museums, and fair booths, but also digital prints. Rockenschaub's early works all represent half-abstract, peculiarly humorous shapes and objects that are reminiscent of pictograms, though neither legible nor interpretable; an alphabet devoid of semantic meaning and with strongly associative content. Since the early 1990s, he has been exhibiting large-scale installations which occupy entire rooms. Apart from Plexiglas, he uses a variety of industrial materials and fabrics to realise these projects, such as particleboards, PVC-curtains, movable partition walls, monochromic carpets etc. Rockenschaub's procedure of 'microsampling', which involves picking out motifs and structures from magazines, trend magazines and commercials, alludes to the way the media shapes and informs our environment - as well as the realization of the installations. English and German text.