(*1938, IT)
Fontana Albero, 1994-2020
Bronze, aluminum, electric pump
150 × 280 × 270 cm

A pioneer of Italian radical architecture, Andrea Branzi is a designer, the founder of the collective Archizoom Associati and a co-founder of the Memphis Group. His “tree fountain” presented here, Fontana Albero, is an example of his longstanding inquiry into the relationships between the natural and the artificial. It can beseen as an outgrowth of his “Domestic Animals” series of the 1980s, in which he combined tree parts with industrially fabricated metals and other synthetic materials, and which formed the first objects of a style he called “neo-privitivism.” Fontana Albero borrows both from Western imitative furniture traditions and from the Yixing pottery of 11^th-century China.

(*1984, CR-US)
Seized Sun, 2020
Existing inground lightwells, six emergency beacon lights (active at dusk)
Variable dimensions

Reminder of another sun,
if the drill goes far enough

(*1991, CH)
Mobilier/Documentaire #3, 2020
Stainless steel, electrical and lighting gear, Plexiglas, various materials
110 × 130 cm each element

The Geneva artist situates his work under the white pavilion, a former station for miniature trains built around 1912. Park visitors use it today as a refuge in rainy weather. Three pieces have been designed for the park, inspired by furniture usually found in the refectories of various institutions (such as schools, hospitals, prisons). The shapes and materials, chosen for their robustness and ease of hygienic maintenance, are combined with colors and dimensions that are closer to the world of leisure. For example, the height of the tables is modeled on that of a standard terrace standing table; as they are also equipped with footrests, analogies to the much-loved world of the bar can easily be found here. The trays of the tables are fitted with small night-lights, equipped with a solar-powered lighting system that activates only after dark. They are decorated with figures and words that deal succinctly with the crisis at hand and more broadly, perhaps, with the way we organize our lives. The tables are for the visitors of the park to use freely.

(*1988, FR)
Naïve Coercion, 2020
Stainless steel, enamel, marble powder
170 × 50 × 50 cm

Parks and gardens are often populated by the busts of figures, some still famous, others forgotten. Morgan Courtois’ sculpture, with its refined, sustained and suggestive eroticism, represents a contracted body evocative of falling, tension and ecstasy. Existing somewhere between voluptuous and violent, the sculpture’s flesh is like an intaglio echo of the Mannerist morbidezza of the Renaissance, whose artists strove to capture the softness and suppleness of human flesh. In Courtois’ sculpture, the flesh is tormented: it is partly scratched, but also stretched to the extreme of its plasticity. The stone surface becomes confused with the surface the skin, and as the two fuse together, they leave only the evocation of a moment.

(*1976, FR | *1975, FR)
Flipper, 2020
67 × 110 × 50 cm

Nudes X, 2020
130 × 225 × 72 cm

Nudes XI, 2020
123 × 90 × 194 cm

Rosa Aurora Marble

The installation by Dewar & Gicquel consists of a series of sculptures that echoes the park, its proximity to the lake, and its visitors. A dialogue is established among a pair of legs, a shell, a faucet, a flipper, an intestinal system, and a bidet. The chalky contents of the lake shell refer to the clay bidet. The bidet, for its part, answers to the needs of the body, whose digestive system resembles plumbing and sanitary systems. Through the flow of water, these elements wash ashore on a beach, transit through our body, or turn humans into amphibians during a dip in the lake. These associations, at once functional and whimsical, are expressed with an embodied eroticism.

(*1980, NO)
Kraken Möbel, 2020
Steel, wood, linseed oilpaint
76 × 75 × 160 cm, two elements
76 × 75 × 80 cm, one element

This Norwegian artist presented her first series of park benches during her 2019 solo show at the Kunsthalle Zurich, where these sculptures created unusual vantage points from which to view her monumental paintings on the walls. Ekblad also conceived and produced a version of these objects for external use. Both furniture and sculpture, each bench offers a choice perspective on the park.  

(1923-2020, FR)
Le Musée sans bâtiment, c. 2004-2020
Steel, various materials
Variable dimensions

Since the 1950s, as a practicing architect and urbanist, Yona Friedman succeeded in reconciling major social and architectural principles, thus valorizing the role of the architect in the community. He emphasized the centrality of processes and users by according less importance to the architectural object as such. Le Musée sans bâtiment unfolds like a structure without doors or walls, a shell ready to be appropriated by the audience. 

During the entire summer, the public is invited to make Le Musée sans bâtiment its own and inventing ways to animate its spaces.

With the support of :
Fonds de Dotation Denise et Yona Friedman, CNEAI

Produced by :
Nader Seraj

Engineer :
sbing SA – Ingénieur civil

(*1989, CH)
Geneva, 2020
Come Here Please, 2020
Auf Wiedersehen, 2020
I’m Not Telling You, 2020
Swiss Life, 2020
Good Dog, 2020
Zürich, 2020
This Is Going Somewhere, 2020
Digital print on polyester
600 × 120 cm  each

The traditional language of the heraldic banner, dotted with lions and mythological animals, is playfully subverted in this series, which replaces those symbols with the animal icons of our urban environments: small pet dogs, insects and birds. In addition to transforming these historical references, the artist is interested in highlighting the soothing and mollifying effect of visual imagery used in public spaces–a common practice, for example, of corporate advertising.  

(*1933, *1931, CH)
Enigma, 2020
Alucobond reflect, aluminum
340 × 425 × 205 cm

Since starting their collaboration in 1967, this Swiss duo has never stopped calling into question the aesthetic conventions of design and architecture. Their new production displays the sense of humor characteristic of their work, and looks like a personal interpretation of the Stonehenge monoliths. Thanks to its mirrored surfaces, this imposing construction becomes discreet by camouflaging itself in its environment.

With the help of Daniel Sommer
Produced by Jörg Bosshard and Alexis Thiémard

(*1945, US)
Grassroots
Never too much, hardly enough

 Frederick Law Olmsted

The expression, sculpture garden less seems a typology than opens subsets of abstract space that intersect members of a patrimony tethered to artifices of guarded pleasures. Protected and preserved, they serve to define geopolitical boundaries. So, why is it that we see so many contemporary exhibitions staged in such defined parcels of land? Is it that parks, or, if you prefer, gardens, lend a pretense of legitimacy to the fact that without its arcane referent, sculpture might very well lose its authorial presence–objects scattered about the landscape catawampus, oblivious to the subtle variations in the terrain. Orphaned at birth.

Marooned

After a democratization process–that is, the transition of land use from private gardens of privilege to public spaces of leisure and recreation–the residual baroque relics that had been so firmly attached
to societal grace become inextricably linked to a variety of desperate civic activities commingling on a fragile veneer of topsoil, fully dependent upon a shared utilitarian substrate.

Invertible Value 

Consummate forms of work have nothing to do with degrees of permanency; temporary expressions are not by their nature incomplete in thought: whether here today and gone tomorrow or here to stay, they are equally viable excursions, if there is a sincere commitment to social value and sustainability.

Working from the premise of an economy of means, it is a pleasure to offer the following contribution to Sculpture Garden, Geneva, 2020, for your consideration: the introduction of a brief “detour” into the gardens’ existing irrigation plan so as to establish a systemic gesture that percolates from below rather than trickling down from above. Specifically, the addition of a new section of pipe directly into the existing irrigation system in the form of a “bulge” protruding above the grass surface.

*1980, UK
Public Sculpture II, 2020

To keep an area of a private space open and accessible 24 hours a day. In this case, Parc La Grange, Geneva (standard opening hours: June to August; September to October, 7 am–9pm.

Private Sculpture, 2020

To keep an area of a public space closed and inaccessible 24 hours a day. In this case, Parc des Eaux-Vives, Geneva (standard opening hours: 24 hours a day).

(*1984, US)
The Rising and Setting of the Sun, 2020
Wood, steel, plexiglas, acrylic paint, resin, canvas
700 × 50 × 500 cm

Through doubling and reflection, the site-specific work of Matthew Lutz-Kinoy reveals a scene  within a scene, a backdrop inside the landscape of the park. The triptych The Rising and Setting of the Sun is contained within a narrative structure which plays with the erotic and the temptations of the decorative. This work comes at a time in our history that requires radical changes in balances of power. By means of the apparent lightness of the pastel chromaticism of the “carnations fardées” (made-up complexions) and the patterns found in Rococo paintings of the 18^th century by François Boucher (for Madame de Pompadour’s Chateau Bellevue), the work of Lutz-Kinoy fractures the political question of the gendered gaze, between the Rococo’s aestheticization of the female body and today’s gay visibility.

(*1990, CH)
MOM (Moon Cycle Dew Fountain), 2020
Steel, bronze, cork, enamel, aluminosilicate, heavens
150 × 300 × 300 cm

Inspired by eco-feminist thought, MOM was conceived to be a poetic and critical antithesis to Geneva’s famous water jet. The sculpture autonomously captures the energy of the environment to produce dew through condensation. Frugal, itrequires no more than a few liters of dew to exist and to strike up a humble dialogue with the natural elements, whose active principles are the sky, the soil, plants, and the diurnal and nocturnal cycles. Its pipes carry the water to drip into the cavity of a structure resembling an erogenous ear. Lou Masduraud’s work remains ambivalent: it is a phantasmagoric and environmental representation of the earth, but also an apparatus for the erotic exploration of the terrestrial body.

With the support of Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain, DCS, Geneva

(*1955, FR)
Pyramid’os, Le Buisson, 2020
Bronze
60 × 70 × 70 cm

The human body, its organs and its limbs constitute a lexical repertoire on which many tongues have drawn has drawn to form many picturesque expressions. From Leonardo da Vinci to Corbusier, the human body has also served as a reference, as a measure. It can be its own standard or part of a geometry, or even serve as a unit in a space structured by its proportions. Echoing this history and these uses, Jean-Luc Moulène has constructed a pyramid with the long bones of the four human limbs. The leg bones–femurs, tibiae and fibulae–join the arm bones–humeri, radii et ulnae–in the pyramid’s skeleton. Thus each of the four joints at the figure’s four vertices–elbows and knees–suffers a dismemberment to follow the laws of geometry. The form erected by Moulène is empty in its heart. This absence reveals the margins to which the lower and upper limbs have been relayed, leaving to the heart, the lungs and the brain their dominant function. The artist defines his pieces as documentary sculptures. This composition bears witness to the representations that constitute our bodies.

(*1957, FR-IT)
Torre Numero Uno, 2020
Glazed terracotta bricks
305 × 103 × 103 cm

An archetypal construction material, the brick is at once economical and rational, and allows for an infinite sequence of patterns, whether through repetitions, rhythms, complex systems or binary contrasts. Using industrial terracotta bricks, and working in collaboration with Mutina, an Italian brick manufacturer, Du Pasquier produced Torre Numero Uno, which is both a sculpture and an architectural construction. The piece not only synthesizes heterogenous forms, but, like all her work, also creates a dialogue among various sources of inspiration without pinpointing one in particular. Torre Numero Uno is a useless but colorful stall, the kind that one might see at a street market or by the side of a road. There are no wares for sale, but it does have multiple stories to tell.

(*1995, CH-US)
Non Condition, (June 25), 2020
Aches in Pulses (July 25), 2020
Constraints about an Axis (August 25), 2020

(*1977, US)
Untitled, 2020
Plastic, aluminum, rubber
38.7 × 10 cm

(*1985, FR)
Yet to Be Titled, 2018
Iron
120 × 130 × 40 cm

The works of the French-Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa, which include film, sculpture and installation, draw on his interest in what actually exists and how it is interpreted, a subject he explores without moral judgment, cultural cynicism or any kind of irony–though sometimes with humor. His practice revolves around indepth research into the relationships between moving images, sound, installation and sculpture, to create immersive environments of which the viewer’s gaze constitutes integral part. His installations include various materials and techniques, and they often expose technological components and digital devices they are made of, with explicit references to contemporary subcultures. His work is present in numerous prestigious collections, including those of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; and Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf and Berlin. 

(*1977, CH)
Dust Mint, 2018
Aluminum, stainless steel, epoxy primer, enamel
640 × 60 × 40 cm

As a subtle observer of cultural signs, Carron ironically underlines the contemporary use of forms that express a nostalgia for a vanishing provincial world. He weaves a rustic vocabulary into the vocabulary of modern art, which has become an international norm. Dust Mint is a column made of apple crates and can be seen as a commentary on abstraction in the 20^th century. When so-called avant-garde artists imagined repetitive abstract structures, the wooden apple crates of the European countryside had not yet escaped their agrarian condition. Since then, the use of wooden crates has returned, thanks in part to companies that sell them as shelves. Placed in the park, this work also echoes the agricultural history of this area of Geneva.

With the support of Commune de Cologny

(1939-2015, US)
Flashers, 1979-1981
Galvanized steel, paint, pigments
246.5 × 58.5 × 53.5 cm
242.5 × 63.5 × 49.5 cm

The Geneva public had the opportunity to discover this artist’s work at the retrospective organised by MAMCO in winter 2019-2020. First presented in the streets of New York by the Public Art Fund in 1983, these sculptures played on the tension between figuration and abstraction at a time when figurative art was practically condemned. If these strange, somber deployments made reference to the recent development of abstraction, they more precisely evoked “flashers”–those subway exhibitionists whom women in New York had to endure in that period. The series crystallizes the reappropriation of a woman artist’s point of view on her daily life and on the history of sculpture, then still dominated by men.

Estate of Rosemarie Castoro

(*1948, DE)
Fenster, 1998
Steel
800 × 1000 × 15 cm

Fenster, or Window, was conceived and produced for the park of the Museum Dhondt-Dhaens in Deurle, Belgium. This monumental steel work, placed vertically, tends nevertheless to disappear, depending on the vantage point, and to allow the landscape to appear instead. The cross within the frame evokes a window just as much as a stretcher for a horizontally oriented painting (often called a landscape format). The sculpture distances itself from abstraction, and functions instead like John Cage’s 4’33”, in which listening to silence is limited by the specific timeframe itself. Fenster defines different landscapes depending on the different movements of the park visitors.

(*1981, CH-DE)
Insel, (crocodile), 2019
180 × 85 × 109 cm

Der Bote, (dragonfly), 2019
105 × 90 × 76 cm

Dogends, 2019
14 × 43 × 43 cm

Over spiraling, 2019
64 × 85 × 63cm

Styrofoam, papier- mâché, fiberglass, resin

Our relationships with the objects around us and the way we move among them are central topics within Nuri Koerfer’s sculpture practice. Her works often take on the shape of animals, but even without any recognizable form they confront us with something that has been alive for a long time, often longer than us. The crocodile, for example, is one of the oldest animals that exist, and while it was a small lizard among the creatures of the Mesozoic, nowadays it is considered a giant. These chairs are an invitation to pause in time and overcome the habit of approaching art only through the gaze. Please sit down, feel your body getting into contact with these other bodies, and consider a fundamentally different education of being with them.

Louise Lawler, *1947, US
Birdcalls, 1972-1981
 Audio recording
7’01
LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut, USA

Louise Lawler sounded out the names of 28 well-known male artists in the style of birdcalls. The humor and wit are balanced by the knowledge that these white male artists are continually recognized as being at the forefront of art, its discourses and its histories, with no symmetrical attention paid to the significant contributions of women artists and artists of color in the discussion of advanced aesthetics.

(*1944, CH)
Cimaises, 1993-2020
Aluminum, acrylic lacquer
200 × 300 × 50 cm each element

This radical proposition by Mosset forces us to consider the walls cimaises of a museum as autonomous works signed by the artist. Usually exhibited inside, as in the current retrospective dedicated to Mosset at MAMCO in Geneva (through 6 December 2020), the five identical parallelepipeds take on a truly sculptural dimension outdoors, complicating their status.

(*1956, DE)
Das Pferd, 1994-2018
Bronze, acrylic paint
220 × 220 × 80 cm

Recurring throughout the decades-long oeuvre of the German artist Markus Oehlen is the motif of a horse. What sets this latest iteration of his Das Pferd sculpture apart from the others is its absurd and comedic mimicry as a cast-bronze sculpture painted gold. Illusory yet referential, its sleek, shiny surface suggests an imitation of bronze, which is ironically what the work truly is at its core. This idea of “fakeness”, creating simulacra of materiality shaped by mannerism and gesture, is central to Oehlen’s work. Das Pferd also bears this ribbed texture, eschewing the smoothness of metal as if he had made a 3-D version of his paintings, with its curvy silhouette existing in the legacy of Hans Arp’s iconic shapes and Picasso’s Minotaurs.

*1971, UK
Hi-Wire, 2019
345 × 104 × 113 cm
Stainless steel, paint

Eva Rothschild’s works frequently occupy the intersection between ritual objects and the tradition of abstraction. Often relying on simple geometric shapes, the work engages with these intertwined histories, amplifying the psychological and critical associations they connote. Precarious columns and finely balanced structures figure prominently in Rothschild’s mutable objects, with both forms and materials substituted in unlikely places, contributing to the fluid dimensionality of her sculptures. Treating sculpture as a way to mediate simultaneous forms of presence, Rothschild implicates the viewer in a continuous search for possible outcomes, even from within a “completed” work.

*1925, GR
Signal, 1974-1980
500 × 130 × 130 cm
Bronze et acier
Collection MAMCO (ancienne collection AMAM), don M. Georges Embiricos

Cette importante sculpture de l’artiste grec Takis a été donnée à l’AMAM en 1983 et transmise au MAMCO à son ouverture. Takis a choisi d’explorer dans son œuvre l’énergie des champs magnétiques. Dans la proximité de ses contemporains du Nouveau Réalisme, il intègre à sa démarche le mouvement, la lumière, la musique, combinés à l’usage des aimants. Expérimentateur infatigable, Takis n’a cessé de combiner des références allant de la sculpture archaïque grecque aux objets de rebut de la technologie. L’œuvre présentée ici, de la série des « Signaux » évoque parfaitement cette alliance du naturel et du technologique, de la forme classique et de la modernité.

(*1977, US)
Chariot of a Secret Order, 2016
Fake fur, wood, amplifier, CD player, stones from Niesen
101 × 182 × 160 cm

Shadow Monster, 2016
Fake fur, leather, thread, wood
260 × 210 × 80 cm

Stefan Tcherepnin is a composer, musician and visual artist. He lives and works in Brooklyn and comes from a family of composers: his great-grand-father Nikolai Tcherepnin was the director of the music conservatory in Tbilisi from 1917 to 1921, and his grandfather and father were also composers and so is his brother, the artist and musician Sergei Tcherepnin. Tcherepnin’s approach to creating visual art is informed by his background in music composition and performance. The oafish absurdity that is Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster–a recurring subject within Tcherepnin’s aesthetic–appears in different versions and includes its transmogrification into a three-footed, piano-shaped sculpture covered in actual Cookie Monster-blue fake fur, with the creature’s pair of signature saucer eyes sitting atop the piano’s lid.

(*1971, FR)
Coup de tête, 2012
Bronze
540 × 348 × 218 cm

Zinedine Zidane headbutting Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup final immediately made global headlines. Abdessemed’s sculpture fixes in bronze the moment immediately after contact, as Zidane’s antagonist starts to fall backward. The monument proposed by Abdessemed is paradoxical, insofar as it exalts a moment of lossand abandon. There is Zidane’s loss of self-control and Materazzi’s loss of balance. But there is also something else: in a sport where every movement of the body is not only governed by extremely precise rules, but also broadcast to screens all around the world, the sudden irruption of a forbidden movement has become an iconic moment, a consecration of the transgression of the rules. As in every tragedy, the protagonist is struck by an unpredictable shot, though the hardest fall was that of Zidane, who at that moment lost his heroic status. 

Presented by the Grand Théâtre de Genève

(1898-1976, US)
Le soleil sur la montagne, 1973
Tôle peinte, collection FMAC

With the breadth and richness of his work, the artist renews the way sculpture is being approached and practised in the 20^th century. The refined and simple language used is at the service of his ever exuberant imagination, as fertile as a child’s would be. Acquired by the City of Geneva’s Contemporary Art Fund (FMAC) in 1984, this imposing stabile with an evocative title illustrates the artist’s fascination for circus, as much for its inventiveness than for its games of balance. Made from steel and rivet–raw material borrowed from the manufacturing area–as well as shapes which sobriety stands alongside abstraction, this sculpture evokes the landscape solely with black curves and counter-curves in the same way a drawing in space would. Now placed permanently, it blends in with the surrounding architecture and public space with great sensitivity.

Le Cours de l’eau, 2020
Larch wood
360 × 200 × 7800 cm

No doubt you have already walked, or dreamt of walking, along a Bisse in Canton Valais. A Bisse is a historical irrigation channel, many of which run through the idyllic Alpine landscape. Perhaps it was this romantic notion that inspired the National Exhibition of 1896 to recreate and display a “Mazot”, a typical wooden Alpine hut, albeit conveying a rather stereotypical idea of Switzerland. This larch wood hut, which could be considered as a forerunner of the circular economy, has been given a new lease of life for passersby to admire in the Eaux-Vives park. Is it a decorative object? Is it nostalgic? Or maybe folklore? The 2^nd  year Bachelor Industrial Design students at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, under the supervision of programme director Stéphane Halmaï-Voisard and their professor Adrien Rovero, have chosen to recreate the architecture of a traditional Bisse. This construction is also made of larch wood and includes several surprising features, starting with a viewing platform, a map of Lake Geneva, a water mirror and a simple bench to sit and contemplate a basic element: the flow of water. This project brings us closer to nature and makes sense in today’s world where traditional values and local sourcing are being revived.

(*1967, CR-NL)
Untitled, 2020
Mixed media
Variable dimensions

Every night during the Sculpture Garden Biennial, the intensity of the street lighting at the gate of the Parc des Eaux-Vives is modified according to the comings and goings of visitors at MAMCO during the day.
This work was realised within the Croatian Presidency of the Council of the European Union and with the support of the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Croatia to the United Nation, Office at Geneva.

Untitled, 2018
Variable dimensions
Mixed media
Thanks to: Michael Doser, CERN

Some matter from Amsterdam gallery was transformed into antimatter in CERN in Geneva.
The work was realised with the Arts at CERN programme/Accelerate Croatia and Ministry of Culture of Croatia.

Technical assistance : Kees Reedijk
Production assistance : KONTEJNER bureau of contemporary art praxis

(*1971, IT)
Portrait of Sophia Loren as the Muse of Antiquity (After Giorgio de Chirico), 2011
Gilt bronze
190 × 60 × 60 cm

Draped in the robes of the Greek goddess Ariane, the famous Italian actress Sophia Loren has been rendered life-size and balanced on a small plinth, surveying the world around her. Gathered in her arms are small replicas of buildings, like portable symbols of some magnificent gesture of civic generosity.

The Immaculate Conception (Barbie as The Holy Virgin), 2010
Aquamarine white marble and wrought iron
183.7 × 64 × 60 cm

Babylon is part of a series of artworks produced by Vezzoli in 2010 for a project titled Sacrilegio presented originally at Gagosian Gallery in New York. This series merges fashion imagery, Christian iconography from the Renaissance, motherhood, and pop icons