WINTERTHUR.- Fotomuseum Winterthur presents Towards a New Ease - Set 4 from the Collection of the Fotomuseum Winterthur, on view through October 14, 2007. For several decades, women were virtually compelled to occupy themselves primarily with themes relating to their own situation in art and the world, and thus to create a (feminist) expression in contemporary art. This was the only way, through intensive self-reflection and power analysis, that they stood a chance of being noticed. This is why the women's art of the past 30 to 40 years is so intensively bound up with the concepts of identity and gender. Representative of this are artists such as Valie Export, Cindy Sherman and Rosemarie Trockel. In the first three exhibitions of works from the Fotomuseum Winterthur collection - which looked at issues of individual and social identity and at the question of how stories and histories can still be told in a media-dominated world - photography by women formed an integral part. Vanessa Beecroft, Valie Export, Liza May Post, Pipilotti Rist, Annelies Štrba, Lidwien van de Ven and Hannah Villiger, for example, represented individually distinctive and also feminist approaches to photography within an art context.

The exhibition "Towards a New Ease - Set 4 from the Collection of the Fotomuseum Winterthur" wants gently to ring in a new everyday life. It introduces work by a series of women in a joint exhibition, thus creating once again a communal rhetoric framework, whereby generations, formats, attitudes and approaches are mixed up together, and the exhibited works no longer revolve exclusively around the areas mentioned but demonstrate new, different ways that are now embarked upon by women in a natural way. Women are now unquestionably established within the art system. They move confidently through the network of production, distribution and publicity. This selection also focuses on points of contact with other genres of fine and applied art, leading to new and exciting relationships between photography and painting, photography and film, photography and performance, photography and literature.

With work by artists such as Annette Messager, Ulrike Ottinger und Marianne Müller, this presentation of the collection of the Fotomuseum Winterthur, which is focused on photographic work from the 1960s to the present, provides insights into the sometimes provocative and rhetoric time when the female voice was just starting to be recognised in exhibitions, at the same time exploring the differences between the western and eastern approaches of the media with artists such as Suky Best, Tacita Dean and Martha Rosler. Ann-Sofi Sidén and Pernilla Zetterman act as "directors" in preordained areas of action, and Annika von Hausswolff, Antje Dorn, Andrea Gohl and Nanna Hänninen concentrate on the independent existence of things. In the work of artists such as Nan Goldin, Roni Horn, Valérie Jouve, Annette Kisling, Leonore Mau, Elisabeth Neudörfl and Yoshiko Seino, places and situations develop a very specific flair that is highly dependent on the psychological moment and narrative form. The exhibition is curated by Thomas Seelig.

Publication: "Towards a New Ease – Set 4 from the Collection of the Fotomuseum Winterthur". Collection brochure with works of the exhibition. Essay by Thomas Seelig, German / English. Price: CHF 5.-