Madame Tricot: Delicatessen

Description

With her unique artistic installations, Madame Tricot - real name Dominique Kaehler Schweizer - displaces the viewer into an illusory world of knitted delicacies. Her smokehouses, refrigerators, counters of sausage and cheese, and platters of vegetables and desserts are full of wit and irony. The knitted human heads and anthropomorphic specimens, on the other hand, confront the viewer with the breaking of taboos and surreal allusions. The installation-like staging represents a balancing act of fine art and virtuosic craftsmanship and draws on the Eat Art movement of the 1960s. The work of the Swiss artist thus repeatedly awakens associations to the work of Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth and Fischli/Weiss.

Madame Tricot grew up in Paris in a family of designers. Torn between art and science, she studied medicine and, at the Ecole du Louvre, art history. For 40 years she has practiced psychiatry as Dominique Kaehler Schweizer MD in Wil (St. Gallen), Switzerland. She discovered and perfected knitting as an art form, to serve as a hobby alongside her career. Madame Tricot loves to push boundaries. She embraces humour and kitsch, the macabre, and the intrigue of ambiguity. She specialises in 3D objects, depicting perishable goods in more or less fresh condition. As medical doctor, the line between life and death has always gripped her. She finds the knitting of food particularly appealing, especially meat, which hangs persistently on the edge of life and decay. Her work has been exhibited at several museums in Switzerland.