Xanti Schawinsky: Play, Life, Illusion — a Retrospective + Monster Chetwynd: Xanti Shenanigans

This is the first retrospective dedicated to the Swiss American artist Alexander ‘Xanti’ Schawinsky (1904, Basel – 1979, Locarno) outside his native country, Switzerland.

Marked by the spirit of the Bauhaus, where the artist studied in the 1920s, and of the Black Mountain College (USA), where he taught in the latter half of the 1930s, Schawinsky’s work is characterised by its multidisciplinary nature: theatre, scenography, photography, graphic design, painting and typography are among the fields the artist explored during a career spanning six decades.

Formally diverse and guided by constant experimentation, Schawinsky’s work bears close and varied connections with main movements of pre- and post-war modernism in the United States and Europe – the continent the artist left to escape Nazism and fascism in 1936, and where he returned to in the 1960s. His practice is emblematic of the transatlantic artistic exchanges sparked by the Second World War that left a lasting impression on art history, of which Schawinsky was a key player.

Xanti Schawinsky: Play, Life, Illusion – a Retrospective covers Schawinsky’s artistic trajectory from his early pieces, driven by concerns around scenic space and the relationship between man and machine, to the pictorial work he developed from the 1940s onwards, gradually integrating a processual and performative approach to the medium of painting.

The exhibition also highlights the graphic artwork that Schawinsky created during the time he spent in Milan (1933–6), as well as his experimental pieces in the field of theatre around his concept of ‘Spectodrama’, through which he wanted to gather ‘colour and shape, movement and lights, sound and words, pantomime and music, graphic art and improvisation’. The pioneering role that Schawinsky played in the development of performance art still echoes in the artistic practice of today.

Situated in Mudam’s Foyer, the space that connects the two galleries of Schawinsky’s retrospective, British artist Monster Chetwynd (1973, London) was invited to create a new installation in response to Schawinsky’s oeuvre. With a similar transdisciplinary approach, Xanti Shenanigans borrows from Schawinsky’s motifs and artistic principles, while adapting them to Chetwynd’s own visual and performative universe.