First comprehensive monograph on Swiss artist Raphael Hefti (book printed by the artist himself with a specific technique making each copy a unique object).
With a career spanning over a decade, Hefti is celebrated for upending and disrupting seemingly ordinary industrial and post-industrial processes. Hefti's intimate encounters with materials take form in colossal sculptures, performances that (at times) flirt with the brink of disaster, and sprawling public interventions. Often operating under the light of Murphy's Law, he unveils everyday things so well hidden in plain sight (and turns the principles of minimalism on their head).
This richly illustrated volume,
edited by Fabian Schöneich and designed by Maximage, captures the artist's complete body of work through his process of making in factories across Europe to their installation in museums and galleries. With contributions from a diverse cast of authors—a philosopher, a science-fiction writer, and an art historian among others—Hefti's material transformations come to life in saturated words and images that tell stories of error, risk and wonder (from the scale of the particle to the universe at large).
Every copy of this book is unique. The distribution of pigments is the result of their manipulation during screen printing, and no two covers are alike. Printed by the artist in collaboration with Atelier für Siebdruck, Lorenz Boegli, Müntschemier, CH.
Published on the occasion of Raphael Hefti's major solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel in October 2020.
Raphael Hefti (born 1978 in Biel, Switzerland, lives and works in London and Zurich) has a singular approach to experimentation with materials: fascinated with processes and often inventing his own, he blurs boundaries between natural and industrial, abstract, and representational. He frequently collaborates with technicians and scientists to reveal unexpected beauty in ordinary materials, referring to processes that otherwise remain invisible but which form the crucial substructure of contemporary culture.
Recent solo exhibitions by Hefti include CAPC Bordeaux (2013), White Cube Gallery, London (2013) and Camden Arts Centre, London (2012). He was also included in the group exhibitions “Flex-Sil Reloaded” at the Kunsthalle St. Gallen (2013), “How to Work (More For) Less” at the Kunsthalle Basel (2011), “Minimal Myth” Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam (2012), and in 2012 he won the Swiss Art Award national prize.
