Klaudia Schifferle
Born in 1955.
Trained at Zurich’s F+F School, she was also a co-founder of Kleenex, later LiLiPUT, an all-female group whose punk energy accompanied her first steps in the visual arts. This dual activity does not amount to two separate careers: it illuminates Schifferle’s taste for experimentation, momentum and shifts of register.
Initially a photographer, the artist turned to drawing and then to large paintings marked by vivid colours and condensed figures. Fabulous beings, sometimes close to gnomes, emerge from the pictorial matter; their presence oscillates between the comic and the unsettling. The forms seem to invent themselves before our eyes, at the boundary between the body, the inner landscape and fiction.
Schifferle also works with collage, sculpture and poetry, allowing her motifs to circulate from one medium to another. A print from 1988, described by the Kunstmuseum Basel, thus reveals a fragmented body within a composition that is still partly abstract.
Her recognition came early: in 1982, she took part in documenta 7 in Kassel, at that time its youngest participant. The Kunsthalle Winterthur devoted a solo exhibition to her as early as 1984 and returned, in 2020–2021, to her work of the 1980s. After living in Milan and then in Ticino, she returned to Zurich in 2002.
In 2012, the city awarded her its Art Prize, acknowledging a body of work in which tenderness and violence, humour and gravity coexist. Represented in several Swiss public collections, her practice continues to resist a single definition: it retains the freedom of a gesture that moves from line to voice and from image to narrative.
