Anna Winteler (1954)
Switzerland


Biography :

"Anna Winteler grew up in Lausanne. From 1974 to 1977 she trained as a ballet dancer and became self-taught in the field of fine arts in Basel at the end of the 1970s. Over the course of the 1980s, she developed into one of the most important Swiss video and performance artists. At the beginning of the 1990s she increasingly turned away from art; After a three-year training period at the physiotherapist school in Basel, she now works primarily in the field of body therapy.

Anna Winteler's dance training is also reflected in her artistic work: movement, space and process, closely linked to reflections on the body - balance, standing, walking, sitting, falling - form the leitmotifs of her videos, performances and spatial installations. Winteler's multimedia, action-oriented work, which also includes photography, drawings and text, is characterized by a strong, direct presence of her own person - not in the sense of self-portrayal, but as a test of physical borderline experiences.

Photography, which is of crucial importance in Anna Winteler's entire work, has, on the one hand, a documentary character and, on the other hand, is understood as an artistic medium.

The same applies to the video works, which, sparingly edited and technically precisely manipulated, give the experience of the time dimension a meaningful structure. Mention should be made of the artist's first video work, Le Petit Déjeuner sur la Route d'après Manet, from 1979. This remarkable video performance shows Anna Winteler as she moves along the banks of the Rhine from a bridgehead to the river with extensive dance-like gestures and steps in slow motion, almost like a trance following, gradually undressing herself, always in the same rhythm, until she - completely naked and with her hair unraveled - runs past the camera that follows her parallel and disappears into the depths. This staging of the female body searching for movement and balance, which addresses the balancing act between the female nude and being naked, is to be understood as the starting point and the meaning of Anna Winteler's artistic work: intuition and immediacy, chance and playfulness also play a role big role like consciously used rhythmic composition and a clear concept."
(Source, website, SIK)

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