Basel | ArtRegion: Basel - Oberrhein

Kunstmuseum Basel | Hauptbau

Alex Silber: Works from the Kupferstichkabinett

14. Februar – 18. Juni 2023

In the early 1970s, Alex Silber (b. 1950) exhibits his works under the title Werner Alex Meyer is Alex Silber. With the creation of the pseudonym begins for the Swiss artist a phase of representation, observation and questioning of the self. In numerous photographs he staged himself as an androgynous figure and dealt with the interference of masculine-feminine. He chooses the artist name „Silver“ in reference to mirroring, reflective materials and surfaces, which he himself uses in his works in the form of silver spray. In this phase of finding his identity, he creates a series of „mirror images“ in which his own figure seems to dissolve. What remains is the reflection of the mirror itself as well as images of traces of movement, of transitions from one moment to the next.

Once found, Alex Silber takes up image and word creations again and again and develops them further. The work complex Der zeitgenössische Bleistift (The Contemporary Pencil), which consists of drawings, sketches, texts, and photocopies or copy graphics, describes these processes of pictorial development. In the sheets, which were created over decades, motifs are taken up again and again and presented from different angles. The exhibition in the Graphic Cabinets in the Kunstmuseum Basel | Hauptbau will feature a series of drawings and copy prints from this block of works, which are on deposit in the Kupferstichkabinett as part of the Karl August Burckhardt-Koechlin-Fonds.

As a trained typographer, Alex Silber emphasizes the equal value of image and text, printed and drawn. The exhibition shows the interplay and interaction of word and image in his works. Letters, dedications, and drawings that the artist wrote and created in the 1980s to Dieter Koepplin, then director of the Kupfer¬stichkabinett, bear witness to the artist’s decades-long association with the Kunstmuseum Basel.