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« Through my work, I seek to defamiliarize the world. Through manipulation, reproduction, and extensive molding, I question familiar things, pushing them towards the absurd, the poetic, or the whimsical. My sources come from everyday life, science, the arts, or simply from collected familiar objects to which I apply processes of my own invention: transformation, inversion, changes in materials, scale, and substance, to question their status, value, function, and very existence. I seek paradox, the emergence of unexpected meanings. » After studying biology, Christian Gonzenbach (born in 1975) graduated from the Geneva University of Art and Design (now HEAD), spent a year studying ceramics in Japan, earned a Master of Fine Arts in London (Chelsea College), had two children, completed a residency at CERN, and currently teaches sculpture at HEAD, in addition to his artistic practice, which includes about ten exhibitions a year in Switzerland and elsewhere. Constantly questioning our material culture, our relationship to objects and their manufacturing techniques, Christian Gonzenbach has developed a space for experimentation closer to a laboratory than a workshop. He resembles an alchemist searching for that point where everything suddenly reverses, where values are inverted and we finally see clearly, or nothing at all.
For over twenty years, Christian Gonzenbach has pursued a plastic and poetic quest, manipulating and transforming objects and materials, gestures and concepts. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in institutions in Switzerland and abroad. His work is part of important public and private collections, such as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Essl Collection in Vienna, the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris, the MUDAC in Lausanne, and the FMAC in Geneva.
www.gonzenbach.net