Yves Netzhammer
Yves Netzhammer (born in 1970 in Switzerland) is a computer artist who produces video installations, graphics, and object art. Netzhammer studied architecture there and later obtained a diploma at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich, department of visual design. He has been working with video installations, slide projections, drawings and objects since 1997. Since 2006, Netzhammer publishes online in the blog Journal for Art, Sex and Mathematics. In 2007, he represented Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale together with Ugo Rondinone, Urs Fischer and Christine Streuli. He was involved in the Kiev Biennial in 2015 with the spatial installation The Child of the Saw is the board, consisting of murals, sculptures and a video triptych with a 30-minuted loop. In 2017, he designed a permanent installation with abstracted pictograms showing human and animal portraits for the escalator area of the in Vienna under the title Face Surveillance Snails. It is made up of four printed areas of approximately 830 m2 in flip-flop paint.
Das Kind der Säge ist das Brett [The Child of the Saw is the Board]
2015,
Installation
Swiss artist Yves Netzhammer produced the installation The Child of the Saw is the Board [The Child of the Saw is the Board] in 2015 for that year’s Kyiv Biennial. Including a video triptych, sculptural objects, and wall paintings, it is reminiscent of a stage that provides the set and props for an upcoming play. While the model-like figures in Netzhammer’s oeuvre stand for the human in general and recur in variations, here the colors, forms, and themes are indebted to the specific exhibition site – a post-Soviet country in the context of which he explored the formal vocabulary and history of Russian Constructivism. Formal-aesthetic references to elements favored by artists such as Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, and Vladimir Tatlin also appear in the computer-animated videos, in which the figures are involved in a wide variety of scenes, some absurd, others violent. We see golfers playing with scythes instead of golf clubs, one riding a bomb – Netzhammer’s otherwise genderless figures are clearly men here; a wound gapes in a tree; there is a rocket launch, target practice, drones, and even scenes of torture make an appearance. (Christa Benzer)
Augarten Contemporary, hoast, IG Architektur, Laurenz, Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Never At Home, Waffen Franz Kapfer, New Jörg, Ve.Sch
October 17–December 17
Main Exhibition
Curators: Serge Klymko, Hedwig Saxenhuber and Georg Schöllhammer
Copyright Yves Netzhammer, 2023.