Publication

To accompany Charlotte Prodger’s exhibition, the artist’s first monograph, featuring numerous illustrations and texts, will be published in November 2021 by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne.

For the first time in Switzerland, the work of the Turner Prize winner Charlotte Prodger can be encountered at the Kunst Museum Winterthur. Parallel to this – and as an enrichment of the context – a dialogue exhibition by the two outstanding British artists Alan Charlton and Richard Long will be on view.

Charlotte Prodger (*1974) is one of the most innovative artists of the younger generation in the field of video art. She was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize in 2018 for her work BRIDGIT, which she filmed entirely with a mobile phone. In 2019 she represented Scotland at the 58th International Art Biennale in Venice. In her work, the artist addresses socially pressing issues around gender politics, individuality and freedom through a radically subjective lens. Despite international recognition, her work deserves to be more widely discovered. Blanks and Preforms is Charlotte Prodger’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, for which she created a new video work entitled Orange Film.

Alan Charlton (*1948) and Richard Long (*1945) are among the most outstanding British artists of recent decades. Long is recognised as one of the pioneers of so-called Land Art, an art movement since the 1960s that interprets the landscape as a site for work, exhibition and experience. Alan Charlton, on the other hand, is one of the most radical painters of his generation. He characterises himself as a man who creates grey paintings. Since 1969, his paintings have been executed exclusively in this (non-)colour. In dialogue, Long’s and Charlton’s works deploy a spectrum of the central questions of the art of their epoch: the search for new possibilities for art beyond academic traditions and institutional constraints. The double exhibition of Alan Charlton and Richard Long will be realised with holdings from the museum’s own collection and selected loans. The foundation for this is the extensive long-term loan of the Dutch collection Agnes and Frits Becht, which was brought to Winterthur in 2020. Among them are first-rate early works by the two artists, which the collector couple acquired as real pioneers in their day.

This unique combination of representatives of two generations of British art is further linked on the basis of Charlotte Prodger’s interest in the Land Art of the 1970s, which she cites in her videos, as well as through her radical formal reduction and her preference for grey values, as can be seen in her photographic works.