VON BARTHA, BASEL
PLACE DES CUBES
02.09 – 29.10.2022, von Bartha Basel
Place des Cubes, is divided into two parts, the first exploring recent photo collages situated in the gallery‘s north space
in conversation with new sculptural works. Further in the south space, visitors can then discover one of Rebetez‘s latest
projection works Place des Cubes, evoking a square in Belfort (France) built in the 80‘s in a postmodern style.
This video work has given the exhibition its title and refers to the nickname providedby the local community to the officially
named “Place de Franche-Comté”, which was inaugurated in 1988 and designed by urban planner Jacqueline Tribillon.
Located in a neighborhood dedicated to social housing, the Place des Cubes was intended to act as a playground for
children and adults - the square quickly suffered from the ravages of time and vandalism. The composition, freely inspired
by Mondrian or the ‚Rubick’s Cube‘ depending on your point of view, makes it a witness of its time contradictions and
incongruous positivism.
The view that the projection Place des Cubes casts on this place is not intended as a moralising and revisionist critique
of the project, but rather as a disinterested and detached gaze. A poetic psychogeographic study about the ambivalence
of a local utopian project that was intended to be popular.
Front: Untitled (photo collage), 1999 - 2022 (20 photo collages in two display cases)
Back (left): Cap, 2022 - Wood, geso / 90 × 200 × 90 cm
(right) Escape stairs, 2022 - Corten steel, waterjet cutting / 95 × 41 × 2 cm
Front: Untitled (photo collage), 1999 - 2022 (20 photo collages in two display cases)
Back: Ivy, 2018 -22 - Painted Aluminium / 112 x 320 x 20 cm
Untitled (photo collage), 2009
Photo collage, 19,7 x 21,9 cm
Front: Hong Kong Portal, 2018 - Aluminum, waterjet cutting / 230 × 280 × 100 cm (variable)
Back: Sunset placebo, 2022 - Mixed medias / variable sizes
Place des Cubes, 2022
Digital projection, 80 photographs, loop, duration 15 mn / 300 x 450 cm
Place des Cubes, 2022
Digital projection, 80 photographs, loop, duration 15 mn / 300 x 450 cm
Place des Cubes, 2022
Digital projection, 80 photographs, loop, duration 15 mn / 300 x 450 cm
Sunset placebo, 2022
Mixed medias / variable sizes
• Link to the exhibition website
ISTITUTO SVIZZERO ROMA - MILANO
Book Launch: New monograph COMMON TALES
09.12.2020 – 18.00, Istituto Svizzero Roma - Milano
Online talk with architect Victoria Easton, Boris Rebetez and book contributor Philip Ursprung.
With texts by:
INES GOLBACH
MEREDITH STADLER
ADAM SZYMCZYK
RETO THÜRING
PHILIP URSPRUNG
• Link to the online talk
Common Tales, 2020
188 pages, printed in color and black / white
Format: 28 x 21 cm / Langages: German / english
Graphic design: Ronnie Fueglister
Published by Nero Editions
Order by: Les presses du réel
VON BARTHA S-CHANF
SENTENCES
28.07 – 07.09.2018, von Bartha S-Chanf
With a background in language and writing, the series is underpinned by a modernist grammar based on geometrical
elements, such as the triangle, right angle, and circle. Akin to contemporary architecture, these means of expression
shape the artist’s visual vocabulary, bringing the sculptures to life as complete syntactical forms.
Consisting of finely wrought and colourfully painted steel, Rebetez’s sculptures render visible the different directions and
movements within a specific space. Reminiscent of forms without function "be it structures, vessels or containers" Rebetez
invites the viewer to consider the objects as traces or recollections of a utilization process.
The formalistic modernist design vocabulary leaves room for further interpretation and prospective pro-ject ideas, in this
way the works can also be considered architectural models or plans. While consciously playing with the notion of utopia,
Rebetez resumes the longstanding theme of his art: spatial and temporal phases of transition.
Studio and exhibition view: Sentences, 2018
• Link to the exhibition website
VITRINE LONDON
COLUMNIST
27 june – 8 august 2015, Vitrine Gallery London
With his architectural intervention, Rebetez alters the physical nature of the space and activates it, creating a new
environment for the viewer to inhabit. Working with the columns and architecture of the gallery, Rebetez’s photographs
will be projected from within the walls into the gallery space. Images show details of neoclassical structures – columns,
beams, pillars and arches – drawing the viewer from the urban context of the modern pillar, from which the projections
stem, into a magnificent architectural past.
• Curated by Alys Williams
Columnist, 2014
Projection on translicide screen, 80 digital photographs, loop, duration 15 mn / 200 x 266 cm
• Link to the exhibition website
KUNSTHAUS BASELLAND
COLUMNIST
24.1 - 23.3 2014, Kunsthaus Baselland
" In the Kunsthaus Baselland the artist is building two additional columns into the support system of the upper
galleries, which could have a structural use in their locations. If one thinks back to the title, Columnist, one could
read it associatively, relating it to the term column. Accordingly, a Columnist is someone who deals with columns.
More than 80 black and white photographs will be projected from one of these columns, giving detailed insights
into an instance of palatial architecture from the 19th century... "
• Curated by Ines Goldbach
Columnist (map), 2014
Ink on paper / 110 x 110 cm (drawing), 80 x 130 x 130 cm (Vitrine)
Exhibition view: Columnist, 2014
Back: Columnist, 2014
Projection, 80 digital photographs, loop, duration 15 mn / 310 x 412 cm
Front: Pillar, 2014
Laminate, wood structure / 310 x 140 x 95 cm
• Link to the exhibition website
• Link to the exhibition publication: Boris Rebetez COLUMNIST
VON BARTHA BASEL
SYNDROME TEMPOREL
Sep 10 - Oct 26, 2013, von Bartha Basel
..."The iconography of months may have a rich tradition, but the months as portrayed by Rebetez do not appear
in costume of allegorical representation, nor they seem to correspond to colors and moods of seasons or else
hint at individual character expected from a January, March or September as codified in popular proverbs.
Mild, pleasant and saturated with even light, without weather and without time, that year seems to be measured
exclusively by evocative names of months that once used to point to Roman deities, rulers of Rome and natural
phenomena – March for Mars, April for flower buds opening, July for Julius Caesar.
Lacking any recognizable referents in views depicted, the names feel similarly interchangeable, opaque, and
cease to denote any specific emotional or cultural content. The year appears as artificial space of the garden city
and not as time of nature. Here, the time stopped still, or experienced a cardiac arrest, like in Edgar Allan Poe’s
1839 story The Devil in the Belfry. In Poe’s fictional town of Vondervotteimittiss (sounding a bit Austrian, Swiss or
Dutch, and spelled in English as “wonder-what-time-it-is”), the devil – a stranger who came to town – climbs the
belfry and makes the bell strike thirteen hour at noon. The result of this rupture is chaos, the sudden and complete
momentary collapse of the social structure, no longer kept in check by predictable succession of hours."...
Text extract:
Adam Szymczyk
ll reviendra, le Temps des cerises, 2020
From left: Socle social, 2013, L'année des treiz mois (Mai, Novembre), 2013, Folly, 2013
Front: Folly, 2013 - Laminates, wood / 290 × 365 × 300 cm
Back: L'année des treiz mois (Mars, Octobre), 2013
Front: Socle sociale, 2013 / Folly, 2013 / Stratus, 2013
Stratus, 2013
Anodized aluminium / 25 x 350 x 210 cm
Front: Socle sociale, 2013 - Bricks, wood, paint / 84 × 89 × 89 cm
Back: L'année des treiz mois (Mars, octobre, Janvier), 2013
L'année des treiz mois (Mars, Janvier), 2013
Watercolour on paper / each 156 x 114 cm (serie of 13)
Front: Anachronos, 2013
Back: L'année des treiz mois (Septembre), 2013
Anachronos, 2013
Aluminium, steel, sun protection sheet / ø 110 × 270 cm (variable)
Topique Nr. 2, 2013
Lime wood, steel, paint, color filter, glass / 147 x 80 x 120 cm
Back: L'année des treiz mois (Août), 2013
• Link to the exhibition website
KUNSTRAUM RIEHEN
ANTICHAMBRE
26. Mai bis 1. Juli 2012, Kunstraum Riehen
For the exhibition Antichambre in the Kunst Raum Riehen, Boris Rebetez created two exhibition situations on the first
and second floors that can be most accurately described as a sequence of two chapters loosely linked with one another.
On the upper floor, a series of 81 photographs can be seen. The black-and white photographs document the two
garden cities, Floréal and Le Logis, built in Watermael-Boisfort in eastern Brussels at the beginning of the twentieth
century, under the direction of city planner Louis Van der Swaelmen and architect Jean-Jules Eggericx. The garden cities
can be read as utopias, erected to bring together urban living space and rural village culture. Boris Rebetez’s photographs
bear poetic witness to the multiple perspectives. The slow decay and the utopia, caught up by reality, are equally a part of
the pictures as is the continuing fascination for aesthetics and functionality of the constructed microcosms.In some of the
photographs, parts of buildings, covered with black tiles, can be seen on the exterior. This architectural detail is the
starting point for Rebetez’s room installation on the first floor.
The intentional impact, lurking behind the exhibition title (Antichambre) finds direct analogy in the reflecting, repellent,
and cold surfaces of the tiles. Daylight is absorbed through the window casings and the fluorescent lighting additionally
bathes the setting in an artificial and cold light. The artistic intervention negates the function of the room as a reception
area, turning it into a transitory area, in which everything is designed to propel forward and lead away.
The first floor thus serves as a transition or introduction to the slide projections on the second floor, in some of which the
tiles can be found again in the photographs no longer as physically present and formative architectural elements, but as
vague recollections and dark resonance spaces.
• Text by Reto Thüring
Installation view: Antichambre, first floor Kunstraum Riehen
Laminate (pillars), two neon boxes / site specific installation
Installation view: Antichambre, second floor Kunstraum Riehen
Le logis ou le secret identitaire, 2011
Projection, 81 slides in loop of the garden city Le logis
Installation view: Antichambre, second floor Kunstraum Riehen
Le logis ou le secret identitaire, 2011
Projection, 81 slides in loop of the garden city Le logis
• Link to the exhibition website
VON BARTHA S-CHANF
L'ESPACE D'APRÈS
17 .2 - 10.3 2012, von Bartha S-Chanf
Boris Rebetez’s exhibition at the von Bartha Chesa in S-chanf is his first solo project with the Galerie von Bartha.
The work, which the artist made especially for this exhibition, is tied conceptually to the sculpture, which was
exhibited in the entrance hall of the Brussels showroom Komplot in 2011. Rebetez continues with this intervention
by picking up and responding to the characteristics of the showroom in the Engadin. The monumental wood
sculpture fills the white cube of the gallery. However, it leaves enough space for the visitor to move freely.
The sculpture is a structure inside a structure, which again is placed inside another structure.
• Text Reto Thüring
L'espace d'après, 2012
Painted wood, neon light / site specific installation
• Link to the exhibition website
KOMPLOT BRUSSELS
LE LOGIS, Boris Rebetez
27 June to 27 August 2011, Komplot Brussels
Le Logis, 2011
Painted wood, neon light / site specific installation
• Curated by Sonia Demience
• Link to the exhibition website
KUNSTMUSEUM SOLOTHURN
ANTICIPATION
05.06.2010 – 08.08.2010, Kunstmuseum Solothurn
Boris Rebetez’s installation produces an effective whole from the formal aspects of the physical space and the sum
of the atmospheric elements that constitute this place. His intervention doesn’t set itself up in opposition to the situation
at hand, quite the reverse: it accentuates, reinforces, substantiates what was already present in the space, but which
wouldn’t have become visible without his intervention. For this very reason, his installations appear minimalist and
restrained at first glance, but unfold their effectiveness all the more convincingly when viewed over a longer period of time.
The central moment of his works is emptiness, which is not understood in the sense of a meaningless space in between,
but rather participates in the artistic process. “Often enough, (the emptiness) appears only as an omission. Emptiness is
held then to be an absence of something to fill up a cavity or gap. Yet presumably, the emptiness is closely allied to the
special character of place, and therefore not an absence, but a bringingforth. Emptiness is not nothing. It is also not an
omission. In terms of sculptural embodiment, emptiness functions as an exploratory and creative inauguration of places.
• Curated by Barbara von Flüe
Grand Hall, 2010
Styrofoam, wood structure, plaster, pigment / 420 x 450 x 330 cm (staircase) 436 x 36 x 36 cm (pillar)
Portail, 2010
Plexiglass, painted wood, metal / 340 x 160 x 4 cm
Uccellacci e uccellini (d'après André Bloc et Pier Paolo Pasolini), 2008
Galvanized steel / 270 x 80 x 110 cm
Collection: Kunstmuseum Solothurn
• Link to the exhibition publication: Boris Rebetez ANTICIPATION
ISTITUTO SVIZZERO ROM
SWISS CUBE
11.12 2008 - 27.04 2009, Istituto Svizzero di Roma
During the entire event, artists, musicians, choreographers, dancers, curators, and university research workers will
discuss these and other open questions on contemporaneity with participation from the audience.
• Curated by Salvatore Lacquagnina
Podium, autumn 2008 - spring 2009
(scenography for a series of events organised within the institute)
Wood, paint / site specific installation
• Link to the exhibition website
ABBATIALE DE BELLELAY
LA RECEPTION
22.6. - 13.9.2008, Fondation de l'abbatiale de Bellelay
La "Réception" by Boris Rebetez offers a more committed conception in the 'profanation' of the space, the
abbeychurch of Bellelay. In so doing he reinstates it to common use. And if he likes to dive into culture, it is
because he stages the present world, declining its historical cycles clashing against each other, and which he
simultaneously understands. He places the real in a field of tension, an realizes it, becoming its mediator.
• Text extract: Sarah Zürcher
• Curated by Valentine Reymond
Fiat 1934, 2008
Polyethyren, wood, acrystal, paint / 125 x 315 x 135 cm
Front: Suprême, 2006
Back: Fiat 1934, 2008
Front: Suprême, 2006
Back: Uccellacci e uccellini (d'après André Bloc et Pier Paolo Pasolini), 2008
Le Corbusier en Italie, 2008
Gouache on paper / 55 x 75 cm
Collection: Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt
• Link to press article
• Link to the exhibition publication:
GALERIE MICHELINE SZWAJCER ANTWERP
Duo show
Boris Rebetez, Lieven de Boeck
11.6 - 28.7 2007, Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerpen
Front: Dawning of an ancient era (pillar), 2007
Brown mirror / 310 x 15 x 15 cm
Back: Untitled (photo collage), 2007
C-print under glass / each 40 x 55 cm
• Curated by Anne-Claire Schmitz
ETABLISSEMENT D'EN FACE BRUSSELS
FORTERESSE
7.1 - 22.2 2007, Etablissement d'en face projects Brussel
Rebetez developed two site-specific works for the independent exhibition space “Etablissement d’en face” that
incorporate the found space, including manifest traces of earlier exhibitions. An acrylic glass work was integrated
into and filled the large display window of the former retail store; painted in a semi-transparent, pastel-colored
lacquer, the work depicts a view from a slightly elevated perspective into the illusionary space of an atrium-like foyer.
Extreme vanishing points and the dynamic structuring of the pictorial space into color fields of varying sizes create
the impression of an intricate, angular interior, in the unseen corners of which lurks something possibly repressed
and forgotten.
The sculptural installation in the interior also revolves around questions of the memory of places. The point of
departure for the work is a square hole in the wooden floor (a residue from the previous exhibition) which led into
the dingy basement, illuminated only by daylight from the ground floor. Rebetez erected a landscape of pedestals
using cuboid blocks of different sizes there in the semi-darkness, from which a rectilinear, columnar sculpture,
with a few centimeters to spare, projected through the opening in the floor to the ceiling of the exhibition room,
where it connected with a ceiling joist like an architectural element with a support function. To the same extent
that Rebetez concealed his sculpture with the powerful title Forteresse in this camouflage of art as architecture,
the space itself became part of the work. In contrast, the elongated cubic indentations at the top of the column
referenced its essential character as a model. Rebetez thus alludes to Kasimir Malevich’s Architektons from the
1920s. Even if they may be reminiscent of futuristic highrise complexes or highly stylized models of mountain
ranges or crystals, they were conceived without a specific scale, without history or function. Rebetez’s installation
also lingers in a precisely calculated blur that obtains between the realities of sculpture, model, and architecture.
• Text Dietrich Roeschmann
Exhibition views ground floor and basement : Forteresse
• Link to the exhibition website
MUSEUM FUR GEGENWARTKUNST BASEL
TWO-STORY HOUSE
3 March 2006 - 14 May 2006, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel
The house sounds small. Smaller than expected anyway. And the title of the exhibition, "Two-story house", is
contrary to expectation as well, because it does not allude to the kind of functional late modernist apartment
block that crops up time an again in Boris Rebetez' drawings, sculptures and collages. Instead it houses a story
of two. And therein lies its duality: the deeply personal view of lived and remembered space and the constructivist
urban aspect that addresses first and foremost a general phenomenology of space. For the artist, however, this
space has never been a homogenous place of shifting and multiple levels. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
have shown, space and time can no longer be thought of in linear terms, but only in terms of smooth and the
striated, which endless simultaneities and rhizomes and labyrinthine pathways. Boris Rebetez explores these
pathways in his drawings, collages and sculptures who are not only instructions or cartographies for implying a
somewhat universal utopian dimension; they also map a personal inner space - a space of exquisitely calm.
• Curated by Philipp Kaiser
Back: Pavillon, 2006
Wood / 300 x 1400 x 750 cm
Front: Suprême, 2006
Brown mirror / 110 x 340 x 250 cm
Private collection Zürich
View from the pavilion
Front: Suprême, 2006
Brown mirror / 110 x 340 x 250 cm
Private collection Zürich
Back: Two-story house serie (photo collage), 2006
Color prints under glass/ variable sizes (series of 7)
Collection: Kunstmuseum Basel
Two-story house serie (photo collage), 2006 (serie of 7)
Color prints under glass / 50 x 60 cm
Collection: Kunstmuseum Basel
Untitled (Blank), 2005
Ink an pencil on paper / 170 x 195 cm
Collection: Collection jurassienne des beaux-arts
Entreprise, 2005
Ink and pencil on paper / 55 x 75 cm
Collection: Kunstsammlung Manor
• Link to the exhibition website
• Link to the exhibition publication: Boris Rebetez TWO-STORY HOUSE
NICC
INSTABILITY OF A LANDSCAPE
11.1 - 27.3 2004, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp
Exhibition view: Instability of a landscape
Free space NICC Belgium at Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerp
GRAPHISCHE SAMMLUNG DER ETH ZURICH
WALKING DAY
10. April - 21. Juni 2002, Graphische Sammlung der ETH Zürich
Over the last years Rebetez has turned his attention to a new field: collages. From visual source
material found in magazines and journals he creates new, unreal and constructed landscapes.
The authenticity of this colourful picture world is thus examined; the viewer is challenged to think
about the veracity of the images. With his collages, Rebetez contributes to the contemporary
discourse on the boundaries, or rather lack thereof, between painting and photography.
• Curated by Paul Tanner
Untitled (photo collage), from the serie Walking Day, 2001
Photo collage, 13,5 x 14,5 cm
Collection: Graphische Sammlung der ETH Zürich
Paysage Nr.1, 2001
Pencil on paper / 21 x 29,7 cm
Collection: Graphische Sammlung der ETH Zürich
• Link to the exhibition website
• Link to the exhibition publication: Boris Rebetez WALKING DAY
© Photo credits
von Bartha 2022: Andreas Zimmermann, Fabrice Schneider
Kunstmuseum Solothurn: David Aebi
von Bartha S-Chanf 2018: Ben Koechlin
Osage Art Foundation Hong Kong: Daimao Wong
Fundazion Nairs: Ralph Feiner
Vitrine Gallery: Jonathan Bassett
Bex&Arts: David Gagnebin
Kunsthaus Baselland: Gina Folly
von Bartha Basel: Andreas Zimmermann
von Bartha S-Chanf 2012: Conradin Frei
Kunstraum Riehen: Jannette Mehr
Abbatiale de Bellelay: Daniel Müller
Kunstmuseum Solothurn: Jörg Müller
Etablissement d'en face: Vincent Everarts
Museum für Gegenwartkunst Basel: Martin Bühler
All others: © Boris Rebetez