Tobias Madison: NO; NO; H E P

Beatrix Ruf (Herausgeber)

Tobias Madison (*1985, Switzerland) belongs to a generation of young artists who frequently open up the isolated process of artistic creation through the use of cooperative or collective strategies. The roles that he adopts are as wide-ranging as the media in which he works: sculpture, video, projection, computer-generated and assisted painting, audio, text, photography, and scanned images, all of which are process-driven, and full of references and descriptions of found symbols. * * This publication mirrors in book form the 2-phase exhibition held at the Kunsthalle Zürich, and reflects the artist’s understanding that an exhibition is not a format limited by space, but the possibility of temporal and physical expansion and intensification. Madison worked with feedback loops and shifts in the exhibition format: the presentation took place at several sites in Zurich—including the artist-run space AP News and the notorious Longstreet Bar—that were connected spatially and conceptually by numerous events; the gallery’s newsletter not only announced the events but also became an ephemeral publication, in which a text by the artist and other contents were disseminated. This material is now included in this book, mingled with a deconstruction of the poster series by artist Mathis Altman (*1987) that publicized the club nights during the exhibition, which were shown in the entrance area of the exhibition space. * * The book is the first monograph dedicated to Tobias Madison’s work and is published in the Kunsthalle Zürich series. It includes a newly commissioned text by John Beeson, and two conversations with the artist, one with Beatrix Ruf and one with Bruce Hainley.