He has produced several publications, including Welcome Aboard – Photographs 1980–2000 and most recently Bildrausch. Group exhibitions include Zurcher Kunstler, Kunsthaus Zurich (1973) Transformer: Askpete der Travestie, Kunstmuseum Luzern (1974) Swiss Video, Tate Modern, London (2006) Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins, Barbican Gallery, London (2018) amongst many others. He has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthaus Zurich (1982) Kunsthalle Basel (1986) Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2004) Fotomuseum Winterthur (2009) Grand Palais, Bern (2012). 1946, Beggingen, Switzerland) is a Zurich-based artist. This exhibition is organized by Simon Castets, former SI Director, and Daniel Merritt, Curator and Head of Residencies. Segebre Salazar, will be published with Lenz Press in late summer 2022. On the occasion of the exhibition, a new monograph on Pfeiffer featuring commissioned texts by Devrim Bayar, Dean Kissick, Wayne Koestenbaum, Meredith North and José B. Additional support is generously provided by Art + Commerce. SI gratefully acknowledges the support of Bottega Veneta as Main Partner of Walter Pfeiffer. From still lifes to landscapes to portraits, Pfeiffer’s style oscillates between graceful naturalism and playful self-awareness. Organized chronologically, the exhibition brings together photographs, paintings, drawings, videos and collages made by Pfeiffer over the last six decades to showcase the artist’s approach to capturing life’s pleasures, poetics and oddities in images. Infamous at the time for his frank depictions of gay sex juxtaposed with scenes of domestic solitude and snapshots of friends, Pfeiffer explores the syntax of pictures: how acts of arrangement and modes of presentation generate moods and associations. Pfeiffer is recognized as a key figure of contemporary photography, having ascended to prominence within Zürich’s countercultural circles in the 1970s.
The exhibition, the artist’s most wide-ranging to date, primarily consists of artwork shown publicly for the first time.
Swiss Institute is pleased to present the first institutional survey of celebrated Zürich-based artist Walter Pfeiffer in the United States.