Selbstbildnis

Introduction

“Meaningless, nameless places that are given significance for a moment fascinate me.” If you look at the world from this perspective, there are endless numbers of “non-places” that reveal their inner beauty only to those who possess the eye and the alert thoughtfulness. Swiss photographer Anna Halm Schudel (*1945) has been photographing one project for years that actually has neither beginning nor end. She started out on her “never-ending journey” a trip through the seemingly inconspicuous, the fleeting, everything that whooshes by on her car drives that she captures with her camera. A building as a fleck of color, a copse of trees as if the landscape were marked with creatures, a guard rail on the side of the road: motifs whose banality becomes pure emotion through Halm Schudel’s eye, becoming moving landscape pictures per se, settled between figurative painting and classical landscape photography.

“Paradoxically it is exactly in this blurriness that clarity emerges; metamorphoses also occurring that testify to the relationship between nature and things of culture.”

Michael Pfister in the foreword to the book “The never-Ending Journey”



Mosaic

Every person has multiple facets that combined determine his or her personality. Thinking about these internal images has recently inspired the Swiss photographic artist Anna Halm Schudel to create unusual portraits.

For these portraits, she set her sights on today’s and yesterday’s stars and celebrities in a highly original way. In her large-format photographic art, Schudel erects fascinating monuments to figures of particular charisma – Scarlet Johannsson, Keira Knightly, Barack Obama, and Marilyn Monroe.

All these portraits seem to eschew exact understanding at first glance. The déjà-vu of the faces disseminated daily in the media dissolves into a completely unknown quality. Indeed, a closer look reveals the great surprise lurking in the conspicuously large pixilation: the artist creates a mosaic-like image of thousands upon thousands of smaller portraits she culls from the World Wide Web. All these universally accessible digital images and biographical traces gave Schudel the idea to consolidate the unmanageable flood of visual information in new aesthetic realities. The photo artist reworks the digital portraits of famous people on the computer screen in a complex process. She generally chooses only one section out of every image. While creating the montage she is careful to match the formats and tones so that the reworked picture elements assemble like puzzle pieces to form a new portrait.

The particular allure of these works comes from the ambivalence between nearness and distance, close- and far-range effects. Each of the tiny elements measures only one square centimeter. Were it possible with the naked eye, you might even recognize the artist’s face in a small fraction of the pieces. Anna Halm Schudel thus leaves her own kind of fingerprint on each work in the mosaic series. The artist’s convergence with – if not penetration of – the interior image of a person in fact quite distant from her is nowhere more concretely evident than in these small details.

Almut Andreae

Bio

1945	Born in Bern
1964	Diploma from the Secondary School for Girls, Basel
1964 - 67	School of Applied Arts Vevey, Department of Photography
1967	2nd Prize, Children’s Book Exhibition, Museum fur Gestaltung, Zurich
1968	College of Art and Design, Birmingham, England
	Prize for photographs of harbor in Basel
	“Grosser Europhot” photography prize for fashion
1968 - 73	Assistant to René Groebli in Zurich
	Introduced to Peter Schudel
1971	Marriage to Peter Schudel
1973	Opening of own photo studio in Zurich

Exhibitions

2007	Group exhibition, Historisches Museum Schloss, Nyon
	Exhibition, Historisches Museum, Baden
	Group exhibition, Galerie Focale, Nyon
2006	Exhibition, Galerie zum Schlüssel, Horgen
	Exhibition, Fotoforum, Innsbruck
	Exhibition, Fotoforum, Bozen
	Group exhibition, Galerie Focale, Nyon
	Group exhibition, Gemeindehaus Horgen
	Group exhibition, Photoforum PasquArt, Biel
2005	Exhibition, Galerie von Braunbehrens, Munich
	Group exhibition, Galerie Focale, Nyon
2004	Exhibition, in focus Burkhard Arnold, Cologne
	Exhibition, Galerie Im Ziegelgarten, Monika Wertheimer, Oberwil
	Exhibition, Triennale Contemporary Art Oberschwaben, Weingarten
	Exhibition, Galerie de Santos Houston, Texas
	Exhibition, Festival Foto & Photo, Milan
	Group exhibition, Museum of Fine Arts Houston
	Group exhibition, Galerie Focale, Nyon
2003	Group exhibition, in focus Burkhard Arnold, Cologne
	Exhibition, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg
	Exhibition, HUG Hôpitaux universitaires de Genève
	Exhibition, Arc-en-Ciel, Arles
	Group exhibition, Museum of Fine Arts Houston
	Group exhibition, Foto-und Kameramuseum, Leipzig
	Exhibition, Gemeindehaus Horgen
	Group exhibition, Villa Dutoit, Geneva
	Commission public art, Schinzenhof, Horgen
	Group exhibition, Photoforum PasquArt, Biel
2002	Exhibition, Galerie Im Ziegelgarten Oberwil
	Exhibition, Photoforum Pasqu‘Art, Biel
	Exhibition, Arc-en-Ciel, Arles
	Exhibition, Galerie Maurer, Munich
	Exhibition, Channel Galleries, Neuss, Deutschland
	Exhibition, Hotel Seehof, Zurich
	Group exhibition, Galerie Focale, Nyon
2001
	Exhibition, Galerie Focale, Nyon
	Exhibition, Arc-en-Ciel, Arles
	Exhibition, Nikon Image House, Küsnacht, Zürich
	Group exhibition, Galerie Tigerhof, St. Gallen
	Group exhibition, Interartes im Nikon Image House, Küsnacht, Switzerland
	Group exhibition, Photoforum Pasqu‘art, Biel
	Group exhibition, Galerie Focale, Nyon
2000	Exhibition, in focus, Cologne
	Exhibition, Hotel Seehof, Zurich
	Exhibition, Kulturzentrum Villa Seerose, Horgen, Switzerland
	Exhibition, Arc-en-Ciel, Arles
	Group exhibition, Museum fur Post und Kommunikation, Hamburg
	Group exhibition, Nikon Image House, Zurich
	Group exhibition, "Kunst im Speicher," Wust, Germany
	Group exhibition, Galerie Focale, Nyon
	Group exhibition, Photoforum PasquArt, Biel
1999	Group exhibition, Galerie Incontro, Zurich
	Group exhibition, Schloss Nyon
	Group exhibition, Galerie Focale, Nyon
	Exhibition, Arc-en-Ciel, Arles
1998	Exhibition, in focus, Cologne
	Exhibition, Galerie Woerdehoff, Paris
	Group exhibition, Galerie Focale, Nyon
	Group exhibition, Schloss Nyon
	Exhibition, Arc-en-Ciel, Arles
	Exhibition, Festival Focales in Dünkirchen, France
1997	Exhibition, Altstadt-Halle, Zug
	Exhibition, Alcatel-Galerie, Zurich
	Exhibition, Galerie Focale, Nyon
	Exhibition, Arc-en-Ciel, Arles
	Exhibition, Schloss Nyon
	Exhibition, Photoforum Feldegg, Zurich
1996	Exhibition, Arc-en-Ciel, Arles
	Exhibtion, Alcatel-Galerie, Wädenswil-Au
1995	Exhibition, Galerie Leuenberger, Solothurn
	Exhibition, Galerie Wolfbach, Zurich
	Two exhibitions, in focus, Cologne
	Exhibition, Museo Ken Damy, Brescia, Italy
	Exhibition, Arc-en-Ciel, Arles, France
	Group exhibition, Nikon Gallery, Zurich
	Exhibition, Internationale Fototage Herten, Germany
	Exhibition, Department of Culture, Waldshut, Germany
1994	Exhibition , Arc-en-Ciel, Arles, on the occasion of Rencontres de la Photographie
	Exhibition, Mamyia Foto Galerie, Biel
	Exhibition, Galerie Maurer, Munich
1993	Exhibition, Photogalerie Bild, Aarau
1992	Group exhibition “Polaroid,” Nikon Gallery Zurich
1991 - 92	“Kunstszene Zürich”
1987	Realization of the Kodak calendar
1986	Exhibition, Art Connection, Basel
1985	Exhibition, Nikon Gallery, Zurich
1984	Exhibition, La Plume, La-Chaux-de-Fonds
	Group exhibition, Nikon Gallery, Zurich
1983	Participation in “Kunstszene Zürich”
1982	Exhibition, Nikon Gallery, Zurich