Beat Zoderer

In his complex oeuvre, Beat Zoderer moves along the intersections of artistic genres. His works alternate between surface and spatial object, between sculpture and installation, and are distinguished by an ironic play with the legacy of Concrete and Op Art.

The materials of his early works were found objects of all kinds, and they brought with them their own stories—for example, old picture frames. In Beat Zoderer’s more recent works, standard commercial materials such as wood, sheet metal, textiles, and plastic become the point of departure for milling, drilling, and gluing. In a complex process located between removal and addition, between ordering and disordering, the Swiss artist creates voluminous objects composed of the repetition of forms, layers, and grids. The similarity of forms is confronted with the contrast of colors.

Whereas Zoderer’s earlier almost systematically followed the right angle or a strict grid of diagonals, recently more circles and loops are appearing. Thus Zoderer’s affinity to geometric forms and concepts is retained, but his working method clearly benefits more from improvisation and legerity. The mathematical rigor appears to have been replaced by organized chaos. That is true of the wall objects, whose motifs are derived from the inherent dynamic of the material. But it is also true of the spherical sculptures and the spacious Flicken-Pavillons, or “patchwork pavilions,” that Beat Zoderer has created in recent years in Zurich (Haus Konstruktiv) and Basel, among other places.