ANAÏS DEFAGO

CHRISTINA KRYS HUBER

The exhibition « Double Heart » brings together the works of artists Anaïs Defago and Christina Krys Huber. Through her sculptures and installations, Anaïs Defago focuses on the details of a familiar and architectural surrounding: stripes of light, textures, angles are sometimes reproduced to scale. Christina Krys Huber’s walnut oil paintings question how body languages and postures can be understood in relation to history and spatiality; how they can be experienced in the moment and in what ways they are remembered. Although their practices take different scopes, through an exarcerbated materiality and their uncompromising choice of colors, they both seek what constitutes bodies, be they human, architectural, or objective through their presence, forms, and representations. The discussion opens up on the specific relationships that these bodies could have by sharing a similar location but a different situatedness.

Anaïs Defago, born in 1987 in Switzerland, lives and work in Lausanne and Geneva. After graduating at ECAL in 2014, she continues her work and present it at various exhibitions, in particular at Wasteland in Zürich, at Standard/Deluxe in Lausanne in 2021 or at Hit in Geneva in 2020. She co-manages the artist-run-space La Sas from 2013 to 2016 and benefits in 2016 from the Wallis residency at the Pavillon Suisse Le Corbusier in Paris. In her work, Defago playfully engages with the everyday visual language of her surroundings and pop culture. A photographic archive serves as a starting point for the realization of sculptures, paintings, and installations that replicate life. Despite their vernacular references, Defago’s work is minimal, reduced to essential shapes: a triangle, a wave, a monochrome gradient. Through the abstraction of forms, her works make the atmospheres of everyday places tangible, where glamor, kitsch, and disillusion stand side-by-side. 

Christina Krys Huber (she/they) lives and works in Berlin and Basel. In her artistic practice she explores body movements and languages through painting and performative actions. After studying abroad at Central Saint Martins (UAL) in London in 2018, she graduated with honours as a master student of Valérie Favre in Fine Arts at the UdK Berlin. Her works have been shown at Display, Berlin (2022), Künstlerhaus Sootbörn, Hamburg (2021), Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin (2020), Museum im Bellpark, Kriens, Switzerland (online project; 2020), Kunst(zeug)haus Rapperswil, Switzerland (2020), Tate Exchange Tate Modern, London (2019), among others. Her graduate project was nominated in 2021 for the President’s Prize of the UdK Berlin as well as the Elsa Neumann Scholarship (Nafög). In 2022 she received a scholarship from Stiftung Kunstfonds/ Neustart Kultur.

The exhibition is kindly supported by Pro Helvetia, Swiss art council.  

Photo by Anaïs Defago.