Sites & Signs: Photographs by Georg Aerni

Description

Georg Aerni is a photographic artist with a particular interest in architecture. Educated as an architect himself, he has been working with the camera on this subject with great precision and consistence for the past fifteen years Paris, Barcelona, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Tokyo: each metropolis is also a zone where mankind's will to create is driving constant change. Aerni documents this change in scrupulously prepared and carefully designed series of images. But also when he focuses on receding glaciers in the Alps, his studies of cages in zoological gardens and of mankind's interventions in nature, the extraordinary carefulness and quality inherent to all of Aerni's work is captivating. It sets his oeuvre in sharp contrast to the quickly done, impromptu photography that has become so widespread in recent years. Sites and Signs is the first comprehensive monograph on Aerni's photographic work. The book presents his complete work with an emphasis on the most recent series. Essays on his work in the context of contemporary photography and on images of architecture and landscape, and a complete catalogue of Aerni's oeuvre so far round out the book.

Georg Aerni, born 1959 and educated in Winterthur (Switzerland), has graduated as an architect at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He lives and works as a self-educated photographer in Zurich. His photographic work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in various museums and private galleries in Switzerland and also in solo exhibitions in Berlin, Barcelona and Paris. He is also represented in public and corporate art collections in Switzerland. [See also www.georgaerni.ch]Nadine Olonetzky, born 1962 and educated in Zurich, is a freelance publicist and editor with special expertise in photography. Stephan Berg, born 1959 in Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany), has been director of the Kunstmuseum Bonn (Germany) since 2008. Moritz Kung, born 1961, trained as interior design draftsman in Zurich before studying interior design at Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and later art history at the University of Brussels. He has been curator of the exhibition program at deSingel, Internationale Kunstcampus in Antwerp (Belgium) since 2002. Moritz Kung, born 1961, trained as interior design draftsman in Zurich before studying interior design at Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (1984-88) and later art history at the University of Brussels Brussel (1995-97). He has been working a freelance curator in Brussels and will take over as director the new Canodrom Contenmporary Arts Centre in Barcelona in 2011.