BERN.- After having participated in numerous exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad, Yves Netzhammer is now being presented by the Kunstmuseum Bern in a large solo exhibition dedicated to the unique work of this Swiss media and installation artist. Two spectacular installations filling entire rooms will be shown with videos and objects conceived by the artist especially for the exhibition. Yves Netzhammer’s works revolve around questions concerning identity and the relationship of people to their environment in our present information age.

Born in 1970 in Schaffhausen and now living in Zürich, Yves Netzhammer has won all important Swiss art awards. In 2009, the GegenwART foundation purchased the installation Subjectivization of Repetition: Project B / Subjektivierung der Wiederholung. Projekt B (2007). This artwork can be viewed since May 2010 and for the next five years to come. It laid the foundations for a closer investigation and interpretation of Yves Netzhammer’s exceptional artwork.

Walk-in Gesamtkunstwerks
Besides the just-mentioned installation, the artist has now created a further installation. This additional work with the title The Refuge for Drawbacks extends throughout an entire room, totally transforming the space within the old 19th-century Kunstmuseum Bern building. Visitors can access the walk-in installation just as they can in the case of The Subjectivation of Repetition: Project B (2007), finding themselves confronted with an aesthetic experience somewhere between revelation and nightmare.

Netzhammer has composed an upside-down Alpine panorama in blue and black on the walls. 2.5 meters-long curtains partition the room, parting and drawn as if orchestrated by spectral hands. Constantly new views of seemingly surreal objects are opened up with ceaselessly varying compositional structures. The artist integrates computer-generated animation films in his installations and enhances them with Bernd Schurer’s sound tracks. In the midst of digital worlds, Netzhammer’s cosmos unfolds as a Gesamtkunstwerk comprising images, objects, sound, and movement.

A World without Certainties
Yves Netzhammer not only engages with the relationship of humankind to nature and between different cultures, but also with problems we encounter in establishing our identity in face of the increasing flood of global information in our everyday world.

Viewers are drawn into an imaginary world of animation films, computer drawings, and bizarre objects by reflections or projections within the installation space of Netzhammer’s works. In the artist’s universe, basic laws – like the purpose of objects – have lost their validity and all certainties have disappeared. With growing frequency, we ask ourselves to what extent is selfcertainty something transient and dependent on perception alone. Arcane and downright uncanny objects, wall paintings, and videos conjure up a world that is practically devoid of anything familiar to us. Again and again prejudices guiding our pictorial thinking are questioned and pressing problems in our lives are formulated anew in a unique way.

Thus we can comprehend Netzhammer's installations also as critique of civilization and careful deliberation on the situation of society today.