In his third solo exhibition at the gallery, the Swiss artist BEAT ZODERER (b. Zurich, 1955), who has won international acclaim with his unique handling of objects of utility and everyday materials, presents new paintings and wall objects. Created in the artist’s studio outside Zurich, they were inspired by an artist’s residency in Sicily in the summer of 2024.

One central aspect of ZODERER’s oeuvre is his distinctive—indeed, singular—creative practice. His works are informed by approaches in Constructivism and Concrete Art, but the artist’s ongoing search for novel constellations of form, color, and space endows them with a captivating aesthetic that ranges freely bet- ween radical consistency and arbitrariness. In the past, ZODERER used materials including cut papers of all sorts, rubber bands, wool yarns, parcel twines, office supplies, foamed plastic, and various construction materials, which he assembled in arrangements in two and three dimensions. Since 2019, he has often taken up the brush, producing a growing oeuvre of classic paintings in acrylic on his preferred support medium, MDF board.

The title of his exhibition, Subtraction of Color and Space, is a reference to, among other things, the grids and systems of order that, in countless varieties, preside over our society as a necessary means to keep certain processes under control. Any hierarchical construction evinces blanks and discontinuities that help bring something new and unconventional into being.

Although ZODERER engages in what might be called “system painting,” transferring structures and sche- mas of order into his works using lines, colors, and fields, he playfully subverts this technique known from Concrete Art. In two new series of paintings titled Cubist Watercolors and Subtractive Offset, several grids and paint strata are overlaid with vertical and horizontal displacements. The resulting intersection points, gaps, blanks, and imbrications of colors are essential to the overall composition. “I’m more interested in the holes in a grid or system,” ZODERER says. Both visually and thematically, the wall objects Spatial Offset, Grid Watercolor, Game of Dice und Spatial Meander pick up on the simulated spatial depth inherent in the paintings on view; like them, they derive their dynamic energy from irregularity. In this respect, ZODERER’s approach is akin to Alexander Rodchenko’s (1891–1956); the cofounder of Constructivism produced art that grappled with the shift from flat surface to three dimensions.

BEAT ZODERER