Bernhard Schobinger. Democracy of Materials

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Bernhard Schobinger

Democracy of materials, which traces the work of Swiss artist Bernhard Schobinger, the10 Corso Como Gallery continues its exploration of the meaning of ornament across practices and visions, from architecture to visual arts, as part of the new cultural program promoted by Tiziana Fausti. 


The unique charm of a basement studio that ascends to a monastic dwelling. Traces of a Zen philosophy cultivated in Japan, where he has taught since the 1990s, embellished by a small library of fundamental texts, artefacts and cult icons. A knowledge that pervades the interior spaces, but also the small garden: complete with a carp pond, a small chashitsu for tea ceremonies and huge ancient Japanese granite containers that collect rainwater here and there amid the trees and plants. Here, only a few kilometres from Zurich, in a small town overlooking the lake, Bernhard Schobinger has been working for over five decades.

His career began in the second half of the 1960s, after studying applied arts and completing a four-year apprenticeship as a goldsmith. His training was undoubtedly influenced by avant-garde movements such as Concrete Art and Arte Povera, as well as the anarchic and subversive punk movement, which Schobinger embraced while travelling between London and Berlin. However, as he himself likes to point out: «It was not the artists who took shape from the rebellion, but the rebellion that took shape from the artists. And the assumption that my work is “shaped” by certain events is incorrect, just as it is when talking about Fischli-Weiss, Pippillotti Rist, Martin Disler and other Zurich artists of my generation.»

The harmonious encounter between East and West ultimately crowned an approach to ornamentation that he, without a second thought, relieved of all obvious glitz and consecrated forever to art and rebellion. And without ever losing an ounce of his highly personal vocation.

It is the uniqueness of found materials, scattered fragments of real life – having been fished out with the aid of a metal detector from the bed of a lake, picked up along the pavement or from some abandoned building site, accumulated on travels and long exploratory walks – which retain their evocative power, as well as inspiring Schobinger’s work with their destabilising irregularities and roughness. Pocked and mottled like stones or meteorites, but also sharp like scissor blades or glass shards, metallic and pointed like beer caps, drawing pins, fishing hooks, nails or scraps of iron, disturbing like razor blades or vials of poison, they interact with the precious lightness of Japanese pearls, ancient and disfigured by him during their removal, giving rise to unexpected couplings of gold and precious or semi-precious stones.

To all intents and purposes, it is a singular and determined approach, one deeply researched and a statement, a variation on jewellery that unshakably overturns priorities and value judgments. And again, to all intents and purposes, it is an artistic activity that aspires to make the work a unique and unrepeatable object to be carried with you and worn. It is not what shines that determines the value of things but their intrinsic power, their autonomous and inexhaustible ability to conjure up and narrate, their magical transformation into expressions of the self.

Like microhistories, Bernhard Schobinger’s ornaments transform the interaction of materials into a latent tension that becomes sensual and pervasive when they come into contact with fingers, wrists or a décolleté. These are the compositions of a highly particular artist now approaching his eighties, who remains a diehard rebel and certainly continues to fascinate and captivate us with his ingenuity and creative challenges. «I think in five hundred or a thousand years, when they see them behind glass in some museum, my works will be perceived as works of art,» he told me, adding an uncompromising «but I see them as works of art even now.»

All lovingly stowed away in recycled boxes. Old rectangular containers for Ilford photographic paper, perhaps lined with hair, or circular metal containers for 8 or 16 mm film. And then there are the packages once used for cosmetics or cutlery sets, perhaps lined with satin, providing the perfect shells and frames for treasures that aspire to feed our vanity at least as much as our spirit, inexhaustibly attractive and provocative. Things that change us, which Schobinger keeps neatly stored in found boxes, ones that appear to be an indissoluble part of the work, labelled with inscriptions in cursive marker.

They are stacked, gathered up in rusty metal cabinets in the frame of a studio which, while intimate in scale, does not fail to let your thoughts fly high among assemblages composed on the walls or hanging in free fall, with finds from the distant and recent past, finished works arranged on long platforms fashioned out of reclaimed wood.

If the avant-garde still exists, it is made of such exceptional experiences. Extraordinary and stubborn works that, like his, allow you to breathe in the major choices of the twentieth century, the genius of innovators and provocateurs such as Duchamp, whom Glenn Adamson quotes in his essay on Schobinger, Lord of Misrule, in the book The Rings of Saturn, published in 2014 on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name.

«What Duchamp called “assisted ready-mades”, in which a found object is extended or contextualised without mitigating its autonomous status, is among Schobinger’s most common methods of operation. The handmade and the ready-made always keep close company in his work.»

Their interpretation then remains forever open, always entrusted to our gaze and our feeling.

/ Text by Mariuccia Casadio for CURA.Magazine

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