Pascal Schwaighofer

        
Visual Artist
Postdoctoral Fellow at Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, McGill University, Canada
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Cornell University
Mellon Graduate Fellow, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University (2022-23)
Economimesis, 2013

Silkscreen
Variable dimensions

Exhibition view: ECONOMIMESIS, Palais Rumine, and  Musée Cantonale de Géologie, Lausanne
         

Within the framework of the multi-part project “Economimesis”, Pascal Schwaighofer has been dealing since 2013 with the links between philosophical-aesthetic concepts, economic cycles and the monetary value of beauty, following Jacques Derrida’s essay of the same name from 1975. He condenses this artistic and theoretical research in the thematic and motivic focus on the tulip, which Immanuel Kant described as the aesthetic paradigm of pure beauty in “Kritik der Urteilskraft” [Critique of Judgement] (1790). In the Netherlands, it had already become the subject of economic speculation and an actual tulip mania in the 17th century, which is regarded as the first well-documented financial bubble.