Hans Danuser

HANS DANUSER

1953 in Chur/Grison

“Hans Danuser is among the pioneers of contemporary photography in Switzerland. He became internationally famous with his “IN VIVO” cycle which was completed in 1989. His works were shown in important exhibitions both in Switzerland and abroad and he was invited to participate in international events such as the Venice and Lyon Biennales. As well as Swiss Federal stipends, he has won, among others, the Manor Art Prize, 1991, the Conrad-Ferdinand-Meyer Prize for Young Art, 1996 and the Bündner Culture Prize, 2001. Danuser is the first photographer to present his large-format photographic tableaus laid out on the floor, a conceptual decision that defined his museum exhibition “EROSION”
(2002) at Fotomuseum Winterthur.” (Urs Stahel, Director Fotomuseum Winterthur) 


After working as an assistant to Zurich-based German advertising and fashion photographer Michael Lieb in the early 1970s, Danuser began to experiment with lightsensitive emulsion at the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. In 1980 he started his “IN VIVO” cycle which was completed in 1989 and comprises seven series of pictures. The 93 black-and-white photographs probe taboos that prevailed in the research and power
centres of the industrial society in Europe and the USA prior to the fall of the Berlin wall, the realignment of superpowers and the rise of globalization. Areas that influence and change the development of our society continue to be Hans Danuser’s main concern in the
large-format works that followed, also presented in site-specific exhibitions and as installations.


Hans Danuser is based primarily in Zurich and New York. His works are represented in public and private collections, including Kunsthaus Zurich, Bündner Kunstmuseum, the Howard Stein collection, New York, the George Reinhart collection and Fotomuseum Winterthur, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Walter A. Bechtler collection, Zurich, and Aargauer Kunsthaus (www.hansdanuser.ch)



Collaboration in Photography and Architecture
Hans Danuser – The Zumthor Project, 1988 – 1998 – 2009

The exhibition and the book SEEING ZUMTHOR – IMAGES BY HANS DANUSER shows the photographs of the first three projects completed by Peter Zumthor, THE ARCHITECT‘S STUDIO in Haldenstein, SHELTERS FOR A ROMAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE in Chur and the SOGN BENEDETG CHAPEL in Surselva.  prepared and selected for the exhibition PARTITUREN UND BILDER at the Gallery of Architecture in Lucerne, 1988 and for the Forum Stadtpark Graz, 1989 with a publication of the same name, and for picture inserts subsequently published in OTTAGONO, DU and DOMUS. In addition, the exhibition will include the photographs Hans Danuser took of Zumthor’s THERME VALS, in collaboration with percussionist Fritz Hauser’s sound installation devised for the thermal baths in the year 1998.

“ With his shots of Sogn Benedetg, Danuser radically affected the conventions of architectural photography. Instead of producing a neutral documentation he pursued his own personal interpretation. And instead of reducing the phenomenon of the chapel to a single shot, he in effect divided the building up into individual components, as though for a short film that dissects its subject matter into sequences showing it from different perspectives—these days this approach would be described as “performative.” These fragments allow viewers to reconstruct the building in their own imagination. And in so doing Danuser colored the reception of Zumthor’s architecture. In the same sense that anyone who has ever seen Hans Namuth’s photograph of Jackson Pollock at work in his studio, so, too, will Danuser’s photographs forever be linked with Zumthor’s work.” Philip Ursprung,  Professor of Art History at the University of Zürich, out of the book “Seeing Zumthor. Images by Hans Danuser – Reflexions on Architecture and Photography“, Edition Hochparterre bei Scheidegger & Spiess, Zürich, 2009;  ISBN 978-3-85881-235-3