An extremely prolific artist, Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997) worked across a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, posters, photography, and collage. His caustic and humorous works question the role of the artist in society and culture at large, as well as deeper issues related to general culture and humanity.
Martin Kippenberger’s works have been widely exhibited across the United States and Europe. Recent solo exhibitions have been held in institutions such as the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn in 2019, the Bank Austria Kunstforum in Vienna in 2016, the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin in 2013, the Museo Picasso Málaga in 2011, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2008, the Tate Modern in London in 2009, and the Museum of Modern Art in London in 2010.

Boris Kurdi (1990, France) lives and works in Paris. His practice focuses on staging drawing, which he deploys on supports borrowed from corporate and administrative environments—such as envelopes—into which he infiltrates. To these functional contexts, he associates a personal and lyrical imagery, nourished by popular references: comics, political or commercial symbols, signs from childhood, and vintage objects. From this abundant production of drawings emerge installations, sculptures, and animations.

Renée Levi (1960, Istanbul) lives and works in Basel, Switzerland. Trained as an architect and educated in art in Zurich, she has been teaching at the Basel Academy of Art and Design since 2001. Renée Levi develops a practice focused on the perception of space, using a wild painting approach that draws as much from urban tagging as from art history.
She has exhibited in Switzerland (at MAMCO in Geneva, the Langmatt Museum in Baden, the Kunsthalle Palazzo in Liestal, among others), in France, and internationally in both solo and group exhibitions. Notably, she presented a monumental work at the 2019 Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art at the Musée d’Art Contemporain.
She has received numerous awards, the most recent being from the Société des Arts in 2019, for which she exhibited at the Palais de l’Athénée in Geneva. She has also created several permanent interventions in public and private spaces, mainly in Switzerland. Several monographic catalogues have been dedicated to her, the most recent being MMXX, following her exhibition at the Museum of Art, History and Archaeology in Évreux in 2020.

Elza Sile (1989, Latvia) lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. Her practice brings together set theory and a reflection on image construction, considered in its suggestive and deceptive dimensions. Drawings, writings, CGI renderings, compressed worlds, and enlarged sculptural units all function as modes of interaction with material.
A graduate of ZHdK Zurich in 2019, Elza Sile has recently exhibited at Edition_VFO (Zurich, 2024), EMBAJADA (Puerto Rico, 2023), Diez (Amsterdam, 2023), Jenny’s (New York, 2022), Smack Mellon (New York, 2022), Centre d’art Pasquart (Biel/Bienne, 2022), Haus Konstruktiv (Zurich, 2022), Misako & Rosen (Tokyo, 2022), KIM? Contemporary Art Center (Riga, 2022), and PHILIPPZOLLINGER (Zurich, 2021).
In 2020, she received the Werkschau Zurich Prize, followed in 2021 by the City of Zurich Art Grant. She also completed residencies at ISCP in New York in 2022, and at San Juan 721 in Puerto Rico in 2023.

Alejandro Villabona (1998, Colombia) lives between Paris, France, and Frankfurt, Germany.
After studying at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, he joined Judith Hopf’s class at the Städelschule in 2022. His work unfolds at the intersection of several disciplines—video, sculpture, drawing, and text—and draws on explicit references to various industries and production strategies. It creates shifts between these techniques and the traditions with which they are conventionally associated. This displacement allows him to question and challenge our relationships to language, value, and use.
His work has notably been presented at Kunsthalle Bethanien (Berlin), London Performance Studios (London), DOC! (Paris), Centre d’art contemporain Chanot (Clamart), and the Deutsches Filminstitut (Frankfurt am Main), among others.

Contemporary Art Library, March 2024
Cabinet de dessins at DS Galerie
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