20 Jan 2015

KMD—Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp | The Forestay Museum of Art

Sara Masüger's sculptural installation for the KMD features three negative castings of human hands shaped to form corridors, the entrances of which are visible to the viewer through the windows of the Kunsthalle. They convey the impression of a kind of tunnel in which the imprints of the hands remain clearly visible as such, as though tightly clasped around a contoured hollow space.

The entrances are at the same time positioned in such a way that the opposite windows of the exhibition room enter our field of vision, enabling us to capture a view of the unique landscape of Lake Geneva and thus turning the external appearance of the sculpture into a white topography in plaster of Paris that seemingly overlaps the spectacular winter scenery of the surrounding countryside. The result is an ingenious interplay between inside and outside, where large and small merge and fuse into one single reality.

Sara Masüger's environment was conceptually inspired by, among other things, the two exhibits of Friedrich Kiesler and Marcel Duchamp – The White Hand and The Green Ray – in the legendary exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947 at the Maeght Gallery in Paris, where they were installed next to one another and, curiously, had as their theme the very same natural phenomena.

In a letter dated September 6, (1948) to Maria Martins, the great, secret love of his life, Marcel Duchamp wrote: 'So I ventured into your inner self and found what I thought would be there, having guessed from your exterior—I found 'things' that have no name ...'


Sara Masüger was born in Zug, Switzerland, in 1978. Training as a sculptor at the Schule für Gestaltung in Bern and at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam. 2007–13 teaching post at the ETH in Zürich, Department of Architecture and Art (Professor Karin Sander). Various scholarships and prizes, e.g. from the Canton of Zug, 2014, and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, 2003. Solo and group exhibitions, including: Migros Museum, Zürich, 2014; Helmhaus, Zürich, 2013; Centre d'Art Contemporain, Yverdon, Switzerland, 2013; Galerie Freymond Guth, Zürich, 2013; Kunstmuseum Olten, Switzerland (together with Loredana Sperini and Tanja Rosic), 2013; Musée de Pully, Switzerland (together with Marc Bauer), 2012; and Guerilla Galerie, St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2012.