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Visitors to a Stefan Burger’s show often find themselves urged to immediately reappraise their personal aesthetic preferences or allegiances. This is not due to contemporary art’s proverbial ambivalence, which can fail to grip you individually—nor to the sheer affluence of today’s habitualized critical modes that would drag you hither and thither. Engaged viewers soon find themselves pondering existing binary oppositions, such as “conceptual art” with its unsteady claims of seriousness—versus labels like “high art lite” (a term coined by art historian Julian Stallabrass around the millennium to describe the YBA); or the binary of affective participation versus critical detachment; of an artists’ artist nerdistry versus a generalizing surface styledom. Burger’s “The Gold Collection”, his latest venture, this time at the art salon of Zurich’s tichyocean foundation , managed to create a thriving climate for more-than-dichotomies, with a series of installations that, from the outset, irritated by “looking like art”, but then—in my impression—magically drew you into two distinct topicalities: the notions of material and materialism(s) on the one hand, and those of production and productivity on the other. The promiseful title in mind, the exhibits contained no visible gold, yet many other metals, many other materials, like the alchemist’s world of “shit” eternally destined to be transformed to the holiest metal; gold was not “the metal with the broadest shoulders”, [1] or maybe it was, as its absence was suggested, for example since one exhibited work branded the “Gold Collection” in its title.
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Stefan Burger, untitled (window grille), 2010. Photo credit: E.Sommer
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Outside the building, an atypically brightly painted wrought-iron grille greeted visitors, a contraption inside which plastic door mats resembling artificial turf were rolled up like pre-emptive reactions to possible floods from the nearby water. The interior, visually separated by a perforated acrylic plate, offered what could be called a tidy-looking interplay of sculptural objects standing on pedestals or suspended from a column,and of “flatware”, heavy-looking photo montages executed with a wealth of advanced analogue techniques and of analytical trickeries and analogisms. First, visual contacts may have tended to focus on the two colourful Brillengarderoben (“spectacles wardrobes”, 2025), multipart glass objects on white-painted cuboids, most prominently featured behind tichyocean’s most display-like window. Fabricated in Nový Bor, a sacred site of Bohemian glass art traditions, these playful and elegant-looking vessels, with their elegant, shiny surfaces, are fiercely but hopelessly suggested being vases. But, mostly through their handmade and playful-looking attachments, they were actually more “outside” than “inside”, more coat than wardrobe. Their clean, cute and glassy vibe, vaguely reminiscent of Italian postmodern glass and porcelain wares, managed to transport a very different kind of non-functionality and awkward improvisation by, for instance, proposing two animalistic, Barbapapa-like characters adorned by blobs and hooks and an empty eyeglass frame, least suggestive of being made of glass. The title “Brillengarderobe” alone emphasized the upcycled uselessness of over-refined everyday gadgets equally “celebrated” in present-day social media and old, but still functional TV sales channels. The two players on the pedestal found themselves in the company of more “wardrobes”, one on a small pedestal in the front window, and two hanging next to each other on the space’s white column, with their more technoid silver, black and red-brown tones, and with a silent reference to Manfred Pernice’s Dosen (“cans”) series. The grey cylindrical vessels all but compromised the “chic” reading of the first seen, by cross-referencing bird incubator boxes and CCTV camera units, and by using the wrought-iron materiality of the grille on the outside for their attachment to the inside columns.
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Stefan Burger, Brillengarderobe 3, 2025. Photo credit: E.Sommer
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The spirited dialogue of the two kinds of hybrid pairs offered a stage-like introduction to Stefan Burger’s play with seemingly outdated material and their respective “meanings”. If, generally speaking, his photographic and sculptural work focuses on cultures of the material and art’s material practices, their referentiality does really not have much to do with the nostalgic feasts of “good old” and mechanically tranquilizing, “Modernist” Super-8 and 16mm film projectors and tonloads of Trinitron monitors in the advanced art fields of the recent digital decades. Burger’s manifold works seem to prefer playing half-serious games, with building and taking apart linguistic knots and tangles—first by being unexpected by themselves or by being combined with art- and image-making; then by suggesting hidden analogies, juxtapositions and arrangements that often invite surreal or post-dadaist readings; finally by mixing the apparently condescending signal of being no fashion victim with an intense, almost weird predilection for half-forgotten or underestimated materials and techniques.
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Exhibition view, Stefan Burger, The Gold Collection, tichyocean foundation, 27.06-26.09.2025. Photo credit: E.Sommer
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In this Stefan Burger show, the literalist rhetoric in the “hipster-go-home” presentation and the hybrid combination of material logic and “paterial” technique maybe become most apparent in his photographic image objects. They kind of take apart the photo-metal combo that current photo artists united in holy marriage decades ago: the Alu Dibond print. With almost symbolic malpractice, this technology developed to make cool, stable, sale-inviting objects (which do appear in another part of the exhibition) instead of ephemeral paper prints glued to mounted frames, is being visibly separated into juxtapositions of silver gelatine prints and enamelled and/or lacquered steel sheets as carriers. The black and white pictures thus asymmetrically framed are remote, but only seemingly secondary, “silver” records of installational or sculptural still lifes that have existed in the studio or other exhibits in their material historicity.
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Exhibition view, Stefan Burger, The Gold Collection, tichyocean foundation, 27.06-26.09.2025. Photo credit: E.Sommer
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They contain life come to a standstill, coated, crossed, isolated material objects in front of backgrounds that sometimes react to external surroundings, like the lawless enamel dots possibly referencing the grain of analogue photography, or spatial or relief-like arrangements hinting at unrelated “classics” like Édouard Manet’s Une botte d'asperges (1880) or Allan McCollum’s Individual Works (since the 1980s), insinuating freeform theatrics, game advertising, or industrial sample boards. You get the impression that the freedom active in these photo-framing wall objects is not something the artist has to brood over for weeks, they are free enough and hard enough to predict in their disruptions of referentiality to appear like a natural, living “art language.”
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Stefan Burger, Vereinzelung, 2025. Photo credit: E.Sommer
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Stefan Burger has used a smaller side room of tichyocean to “localize” his strong post-formalist language model to present Natural Sleep (2022), an older video that originates from an “art-in-architecture” research he did on a commission by pharmaceutical world player Roche that was meant to accompany the building phases of their infamous Roche Towers in Basel by Herzog & de Meuron with an artistic comment on the most “powerful” plants that led to their global success. Burger’s explorations stalled when he learned about the restrictions he would have had to adhere to, such as avoiding directness and refraining from depicting people—he would have had to act similar to the approach of Swiss artist Niklaus Stoecklin (1896-1982) and the modest surrealism of the landscape/still life proudly displayed in the sacred halls of Roche, where an inebriated beetle with legs extended skywards rests under the drip-drop of an incontinent poppy seed capsule, framed by a “New Objectivity”-styled industrial landscape. In his video, Burger continues to explore his ambitioned concept of framing backgrounds as he shows a thin moving scaffold behind his transitions through animated views and stagings of historical Roche drug merch which have been poured out over medical and pharmaceutical practices all over the world since the 1970s. The central item is an allegedly very successful series of photo calendars focusing on the topic “sleep” to promote Roche’s Dormicum sleep aids (and other narcotics) as the type of “miracle” that could only be conveyed by an artist. In this case, it was renowned Basel fashion photographer Onorio Mansutti (born 1939) who, from the beginning of the 1980s, would travel the world to take “chill” photographs of global sleepers draped in front of spectacular landscapes, to be collected in his photo calendars, quietly preparing a generation of Rochian doctors and patients for late capitalism’s assault on “Natural Sleep” that has conditioned workers to forgo sleep and still maintain a malleable psyche.
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Stefan Burger, Natural Sleep (still), 2022, courtesy the artist and the Roche Historical Archive and Collection, Basel
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Other merch objects in Burger’s visual arrangement are “deal toys” commemorating significant gains in the pharmaceutical market, like a desk penholder that materializes a diagram of sleep patterns, or simpler giveaways, such as keyholders or ashtrays in the shape of owls, or a geometric wooden puzzle that is shown in slow motion as it falls, hits the ground and falls apart with an unlikely, glassy crash sound that is possibly the only acoustic disturbance in the show, interrupting the rather anaesthetic effect of the video’s gliding motions. Natural Sleep quite directly addresses a shift in the ambivalent “moods” of societal and corporate productivity. It frames and shows a range of advertising objects for mind-altering drugs in a way that refrains from judgment and appropriates the objects’ more or less self-explanatory creepiness as topics of the mind’s life (and death) that art has always been first to work with, as it always had a clear and relevant voice to use since sleep has traditionally been the dangerously swaying bridge to approach its own global oniric empire of phantasms. Older viewers may have felt reminded of Images du monde visionnaire (1964), the historic collaboration between poet and artist Henri Michaux (1889-1984) with Éric Duvivier (1928-2018)—under the sponsorship of the pharma giant Sandoz. [2] Michaux, who experimentally ingested mescaline under medical surveillance in order to study the mind’s reactions to this drug by filming himself and the drawings he executed and the spoken utterances he produced under the influence, with the legitimacy of pharmacological experimentation. Apart from his positivist belief in the ontological sublime of the mind, he certainly had a professional interest similar to Stefan Burger’s—who, in “The Gold Collection”, has aimed at the reciprocal dynamics between materiality, productivity and language. His artworks’ transgressive use of materials does carry traces of immateriality and post-materiality of the already dissolving present of NFTs and artificial language models, indirect traces which necessarily remain invisible, like the hand that rules the markets.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Is_the_Metal_(With_the_Broadest_Shoulders)[2] https://www.ubu.com/film/michaux.html
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Louise Lawler, Aliizarin (Terrorists are made, not born), 2023
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100 Artists for Gaza is an international art initiative raising funds for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and their essential humanitarian and medical operations in Gaza. The announcement of the first phase of the ceasefire in Gaza, brings a welcome moment of relief for exhausted, starved, and grieving Palestinians, and a great relief to the families of the hostages—but it comes after more than two years and over 67,000 lives lost across the Strip. Entire communities have been devastated, hospitals destroyed, and medical staff stretched beyond endurance. On the ground, MSF teams are pursuing their activities by providing surgery, wound care, physiotherapy, maternity care, paediatric care, general healthcare, vaccinations, treatment for malnutrition and mental health services. The official website launched on October 28, showcasing all participating artists, their statements, and their art: www.100forgaza.org. Each artist has donated an original work—approximately A4 size—symbolizing art’s power to heal and connect. These works will be sold through an online auction (directly on the website) and a live auction in Geneva on December 2, 2025, accompanied by simultaneous global gatherings hosted by the project’s godmothers and godfathers in cities around the world. All artworks will open for bidding at CHF 500, ensuring wide participation. Artists who prefer alternative arrangements have options such as blind bidding, reflecting the project’s inclusive and respectful approach. An exhibition featuring the donated works of all 150+ participating artists will be held at Médecins Sans Frontières in Geneva from November 11 until December 2, 2025. The opening reception will take place on November 11, 2025, starting at 6:30 PM, with the pre- sence of some of the artists. 100 Artists for Gaza is more than an exhibition—it is a movement of empathy, creation, and courage. At a time when Gaza’s people face the daunting task of recovery, this initiative channels the universal language of art into action and hope. For press inquiries, images, or interview requests, please contact: info@100forgaza.org
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