{"id":11729,"date":"2015-11-04T12:33:51","date_gmt":"2015-11-04T11:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/?p=11729"},"modified":"2023-09-21T17:34:11","modified_gmt":"2023-09-21T15:34:11","slug":"interview-urban-zellweger-first-time-was-on-a-lovely-sunny-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2015\/11\/04\/interview-urban-zellweger-first-time-was-on-a-lovely-sunny-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Urban Zellweger: his first interview was on a lovely sunny day"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Successfully exhibited in Z\u00fcrich at Karma International<\/a> during the city’s last<\/span><\/span> art weekend, Urban Zellweger\u2019s paintings also managed to captivate observers at the FIAC, where two pieces were presented by Karma in the emerging art section. The then 24-year-old Swiss artist – born in Z\u00fcrich, where he also studied and currently has his studio \u2013 seems to gravitate towards\u00a0paintings which express an evident narrative attitude while sometimes revealing vibrant tensions between human and organic elements. Apparently, the best approach to his system of shapes, colours and foggy atmospheres <\/span>is by using symbolic and metaphorical interpretations of dreams to get oriented. Before his solo exhibition at Karma International, Urban Zwelleger pieces have only been\u00a0shown at Plymouth Rock<\/a> and UP STATE<\/a> (Z\u00fcrich); at Astrup Museum in Oslo<\/a> (in a group show curated by Hacienda<\/a>); and recently at the FIAC, as mentioned before.<\/span>\u00a0He is currently working on two book-projects and a show at Shoot the Lobster in New York that will open in January.\u00a0We met Urban a few weeks ago on a lovely sunny day in Z\u00fcrich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Urban Zellweger, inside a hospital, 2015 Oil on canvas 100 x 70 cm (39 3\/8 x 27 1\/2 inch). Ph. Marc Asekhame, courtesy of Karma International.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Is this your first interview?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Urban Zellweger: Yes, it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your solo show at Karma International in Z\u00fcrich was your gallery debut, how did you feel?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Urban Zellweger: Well, it was nice to work for an exhibition and it made me feel good, but that also depends on the people you are working with, which in my case were\u00a0the people from Karma International. I liked collaborating\u00a0with them and it was easy because we knew each other already. It\u2019s also nice that you get some input from the people visiting the exhibition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Urban Zellweger, how things work, 2015 Oil on canvas 105 x 160 cm (41 3\/8 x 63 inch). Ph. Marc Asekhame, courtesy of Karma International.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

You studied and worked in Z\u00fcrich in the past years. Would you recommend it as a place to learn and practice art?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Urban Zellweger: The school in Z\u00fcrich is not interested in painting at all. But that just annoys me, when I feel like learning something that I wouldn’t find the motivation to do by myself at home or in the studio. I have some really interesting classes in school, but they’re about everything other than painting. At some point I started to like it. It made me more organized and prompt me\u00a0to look for exchange outside the institution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What influences you as a painter?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Urban Zellweger: I recently visited\u00a0the Whitney Museum in New York and I saw a work by Jared French. The painting is called \u201cState Park (1946)\u201d. It\u2019s such a weird scene with a family under a pink sunshade and a lifeguard with a police stick in his hand, who looks like a huge sculpture, and a pale guy with a tattoo that is ready for a boxing fight with the under-body of the lifeguard, even if he’s standing way behind him. The whole perspective is amazing. He managed to create\u00a0such a bizarre tension between all the people in the painting. It\u2019s moments like this, when you find a new artist that you like, that influence me. It’s funny. I’ve never heard of Jared French or saw something of him before, which really surprised me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Urban Zellweger, Butterflies, 2015. Oil on canvas 80 x 60 cm (31 1\/2 x 23 5\/8 inch). Ph. Marc Asekhame, courtesy of Karma International.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

How would you describe the bodies of work showed at Karma?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Urban Zellweger: When I started working for the show, I tried to bear\u00a0in mind \u201chow things work\u201d. I thought it would just be learning some new skills and collecting some ideas, but I had no idea what to do. Then I thought: let’s just paint little puppet-looking humans, and that produced something. It should be the factory for ideas or something like that. It came out really weird. There is a guy cutting his nails onto a conveyor belt, one puking out round shapes and another one tearing out butterfly wings. The last painting I did was \u201cInside a hospital\u201d. I had all the works I wanted to show, but then I somehow missed a human face – somebody that you could talk to or who has the responsibility for this whole thing. I don’t know, I guess a lot of people see something else in doctors other than just somebody with a white coat who has a job and knows how you feel or how your body looks like from the inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Urban Zellweger, untitled, 2015 Oil on canvas 60 x 45 cm (23 5\/8 x 17 3\/4 inch). Ph. Marc Asekhame, courtesy of Karma International.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Would it be wrong to read your painting from a storytelling perspective?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Urban Zellweger: The works I’ve done so far are all figurative paintings or drawings. Effectively I often try to build up a narrative. What I like in painting, is that a story or an image that you are making while painting on a canvas keeps on changing until, at one point, it’s just finished and then you move on the next one. It always makes me laugh when I realize that I tried to build up something which then I\u00a0just left somewhere along the way to the end. So sometimes I try not to think about the story till the end. You can give a structure and put some actors, but then, I guess, it\u2019s nice if you also leave some space for the viewer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How would your ideal exhibition space look like?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Urban Zellweger: Once some friends from Geneva organized a group show in an apartment of a house that was about to get torn down. There was this beautiful staircase going up to the apartment, so all the pieces that needed a wall went into the staircase and sculptures and installations were in the apartment. That, to me, was perfect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The system of shapes of Urban Zellweger relies on colours and foggy atmospheres, taking the way of imagination and dreams<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11744,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1797],"tags":[2034],"class_list":["post-11729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-dialogue-with","tag-urban-zwelleger"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}