13 Oct 2015

'Walk Beside Me' Sculpture Installation in Conzano Monferrato, AL, Italy

'Walk Beside Me' is a call to partnership where sculptor Regula Zwicky wants no hierarchies nor dependences, wants no leadership nor following.

Walk Beside Me in fact is a body of sculptures that read as response to the impellent necessity to review the relationship between artist and artwork but also as natural consequence to a research born of Zwicky's desire to express what the artist is. Her interest in fact is not in what the artist wishes to be nor what she should be. Zwicky's work has reached a level of freedom where what matters is the artist in rapport with her art.

Contemporary sculpture can transform space into area for reflection; can surpass the platonic form as a model, as Shirazeh Houshiary recently said and it can do so via an ever-growing variety of options, in its choice of methods and materials to do so.

Swiss sculptor Regula Zwicky in her whole-hearted use of stone - mainly from the Viterbo region where her Italian studio is based - has proposed over the years conceptual meditations that create vigorous energy-filled work that understands solidity as it does ephemeral. 'Walk Beside Me' is a substantial stonework installation, as firm as it feels transient, transforming space into a field of engagement.

'Walk Beside Me' dispenses with the 'pedestal problem 'altogether, a problem that from Rodin to Meier, Laric, Baghramian, Nashat and Beier has found different solutions (Manuela Ammer, The Pedestal Problem, Freeze, Issue 2, Autumn 2011).

In ' Walk Beside me ' the boundary between base and work goes beyond the issue of becoming permeable, beyond mediating: the pedestal is rejected not only for its 'guardian of distance' function, but because the sculpture for Zwicky is a figuration of ' egalitè ', an affirmation of a new course of events.

The forest of sculpted stone figures and iron rods installed in and around a lake is inviting to walk beside it, to walk with it, but it also encompasses a sense of projectuality, understood as a conscious dream ' that does not shrink from reality but sees it as a project, something yet to be invented'1

1 Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities ( ed. 1996, p. 11)