Pascal Schwaighofer

“The work grapples, thematically and practically, with the first financial bubble in history, the Tulipomania, as well as with the traditional Turkish paper marbling technique Ebru.

The technique first occurred about 3000 years ago in China and Japan and was further developed in 17th century Turkey by creating floral motifs, mostly tulips, following a specific sequence of painterly operations.

The artist’s images were created on the basis of a specific and difficult to control sequence of operations where technique and iconography intersect with the objective of testing the (irrational) criteria so to point at related phenomena such as the Tulipomania, the limitations and freedoms inscribed in the market, biology and theory of aesthetics.

Pascal Schwaighofer uses, as a tribute, an hanging strategy that Luciano Fabro applied in 1996 to his work “Ceramiche”: in order to determine the position of the works on the wall, he threw in color-soaked tennis balls across the room: where the ball left a trail, he placed an image.”

Excerpt from the exhibition’s press release, SVILUPPO-PARALLELO, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern, 2015, by Noah Stolz.