7 February 2025 to 28 February 2025
Tues. to Fri. 11am to 5pm, or on request
Bahnhofstrasse 14, 8001 Zurich

Opening
Thursday, 6 February 2025, 5pm to 8pm 
Bahnhofstrasse 14, 8001 Zurich 

Contact: 
Michèle Sandoz
Managing Director
michele.sandoz@grisebach.com 
T +41 44 212 88 88  

https://www.instagram.com/spichtigunlimited/?hl=en

Grisebach Switzerland is delighted to present, in the fourth iteration of its Travel logs exhibition series, a selection of works by Tobias Spichtig under the title Four Portraits, an Abstract and Two Figures. Based in Paris and Berlin, Tobias Spichtig (born 1982 in Lucerne, Switzerland) is an artist who draws inspiration from the world of fashion, theater, and music and works in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, installations, and photography. He combines a glitzy, Warhol-like aesthetic with a sharp, subversive view of contemporary culture, while blurring the boundaries between the everyday and the glamorous, between the individual and the collective from a perspective of intimacy.

Revealing our feelings can be challenging, yet this is precisely what we are invited to do by Tobias Spichtig’s works. They seem fragile, like thoughts that have taken on a clear form but could fall apart again at any moment. Spichtig’s creations challenge us to recognize ourselves in them – in all our fragility, courage, and longing.

For Tobias Spichtig, preparing a new exhibition means immersing himself deeply into his visual worlds. Invariably, he will begin by building a model of the future exhibition space, creating preliminary sketches which he then pins to his model. The process is focused, intense – and always aimed at creating something immediate and genuine.

When I catch up with Tobias Spichtig in the run-up to his exhibition, most of his images are still in the making. Non-finito comes to mind. This term, which designates the unfinished, the undone, has been in use in art for centuries: It is closely tied to sculpture, more particularly to the hand drawings, that first emerged in the 15th century, whose makers would often merely suggest certain forms, leaving it to the viewers to imagine what is missing and to visually complete the gaps. An homage, if you will, to the incompleteness of the ever-changing natural world. It was not until the 20th century – by which time non-finito had become well established as its own aesthetic genre in abstract and figurative art – that neurologists began studying how our brain manages to complete the incomplete. Their findings revealed that our powers of perception and imagination – whether visual, acoustic, or haptic – are indeed closely intertwined. 

Because it invites us to play this game of selecting freely among possible completions, the imperfect exerts an almost magical attraction. Tobias Spichtig knows this: His pictorial motifs, paintings, and sculptures beckon us into an iridescent resonance chamber in which all the hidden stories and unspoken possibilities we yearn for spring to life. It is what Spichtig calls “radical presence”: the power of the moment, of the immediate, and of the unfinished.

Spichtig is enamored of echo chambers, whether of art history, pop culture, or the mundane world. But he feels firmly anchored in the here and now, in his own time most of all. Though he observes and also indulges in the promised delights of consumerism and imbibes the glamorized versions of our reality with gusto, he does not shy away from the nagging question: What are our true desires? This explains his fascination with the approaches taken by the likes of Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, or Carol Rama – not so much as role models, but rather as sources of inspiration for possible answers to this problem. 

Tobias Spichtig’s highly original oeuvre, with its sense of melancholy and fragility, holds up a critical mirror to our modern way of life, with its tug of war between covetousness and frustration and its never-ending search for orientation

Tobias Spichtig’s works have been shown at many leading international venues, including: Kunsthalle Basel (Basel); Lafayette Anticipations (Paris); KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin); KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art (Berlin); Swiss Institute (New York City); Boros Foundation, Berghain (Berlin); Kaleidoscope, Spazio Maiocchi (Milan); Centre d'art contemporain – la Synagogue de Delme (Delme); SALTS (Basel); Museum Folkwang (Essen); Dortmunder Kunstverein (Dortmund); Malta Contemporary Art (Valletta); Museum of Contemporary Art (Belgrade); Hammer Museum (Los Angeles); Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna); Ludlow 38 / Goethe-Institut (New York); Ursula Blickle Foundation (Karlsruhe); and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam).