"Through my work, I try to defamiliarise the world, through manipulations, reproductions, a lot of moulding, I question known things to make them tip towards the absurd, the poetic or the zany."
My sources come from everyday life, science, art, or simply from familiar objects collected and to which I apply processes of my own invention: transformation, inversion, change of materials, of scale, of substance, to question their status, their value, their function, their very existence. I seek paradox, the appearance of unexpected meanings.
After studying biology, Christian Gonzenbach (born in 1975) graduated from the Haute école d'arts appliqués (now HEAD), did a year of ceramics in Japan, a master's degree at the Fine Arts School in London (Chelsea College), had two children, took up a residency at CERN, and now teaches sculpture at HEAD, in addition to his work as an artist, with some ten exhibitions a year in Switzerland and elsewhere. Relentlessly questioning our material culture, our relationship to objects and their manufacturing techniques, Christian Gonzenbach has developed a space for experimentation closer to the laboratory than to the workshop. He resembles an alchemist looking for that point where suddenly everything is reversed, when values are inverted and we finally see more clearly or nothing at all.
Christian Gonzenbach has been pursuing a plastic and poetic quest for more than twenty years, manipulating and transforming objects and materials, gestures and concepts. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in institutions in Switzerland and abroad. His work is part of important public and private collections such as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Essl Sammlung in Vienna, the Musée de la Chasse in Paris, the MUDAC in Lausanne and the FMAC in Geneva.