An installation of 11 flags designed by Peter Stämpfli in the 90s takes the center stage in the Foundation's new proposal

'In the wind' opens this Saturday at 7pm

Friday 16 February 2024

The Stämpfli Foundation is launching a new artistic proposal: these are eleven flags designed by Peter Stämpfli in the 90s and which until recently had not been exhibited in public again. The sample carries by title In the wind and can be seen in Room 3, while Rooms 1 and 2 offer around thirty works by different artists from the collection.

In the wind presents eleven flags that Peter Stämpfli designed in the 90s for two artistic proposals of international projection. On the one hand, these are three signs that he presented in 1995 at the Art en plein air festival, in the Swiss town of Môtiers. The three flags formed an artistic ensemble called a Standard and they waved between the valleys of this small town in the Alps, on the occasion of a festival that was called every four years and which, after some issues, will return in 2026.

The other eight flags participated in the renowned Paris International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) in 1997. In this case, they were placed in a fully urban environment, in the Eiffel - Branly space, with the iconic image of the symbolic Parisian tower in the background.

The eleven flags are the same size (200 x 190 cm) and are made of the same tricopolyester material. They come in various colors (from yellow to black) and are designed with the usual tire prints that characterize Peter Stämpfli's work.

A taste of the general collection in rooms 1 and 2. in addition to In the wind, the Stämpfli Foundation also offers an extensive display of its general collection, with around thirty works by different artists. It is the same assembly that has been seen in the last months in which the Foundation has displayed the exhibitionVibrances.

Room 1 presents eight artists who participated in the stream of Narrative Figuration (Gianni Bertini, Mark Brusse, Henri Cueco, Gérard Fromanger, Peter Klasen, Jacques Monory, Bernard Rancillac, Peter Stämpfli and Jan Voss) and four others (Christian Jaccard, Peter Knapp, Jean Le Gac and Claude Viallat) characterized by their wit and creative ability

For its part, Room 2 shows works by artists with different confluences: those who opted for a renewal of geometric abstraction or those who entered the paths of minimalism, conceptual art, kinetic and neo-avant-garde art. They are the French Pierrette Bloch, Philippe Cazal, François Dufrêne, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Jean-Michel Meurice, Olivier Mosset, Jean-Michel Sannejouand, Pierre Tilman, Gérard Titus-Carmel and Jacques Villegé; the Belgian Mark Brusse, the Catalan-American Tom Carr, the Venezuelan Carlos Cruz-Díez, the Italian Marco Del Re, the Argentine Antonio Seguí, the Korean Kim Tschang-Yeul and the Serbian-French Vladimir Velickovic.

The Stämpfli Foundation

Swiss artist Peter Stämpfli and his Catalan wife, Anna Maria, residents of Paris and Bern, set up a new residence in Sitges in 1970, and from then on divided their time between the three towns. From the first day, the Stämpflis became active neighbors in Sitges and participated especially in its cultural life. They promoted popular festivals and civic activities with great citizen response and rehabilitated and ceded to the population a building to be a Cultural Space on Carrer d'en Bosc, in the heart of the old quarter, as the seat of the Sitgetan Studies Group. In gratitude for his connection, contribution to the cultural life of the locality and his contribution to the international dissemination of the name of Sitges, in 2004 the City Council honored Pere Stämpfli as an Adoptive Son of the Town.

It was at the end of the first decade of the s. XXI, when the Stämpfli couple decided to give shape to an old idea: for Sitges to have a collection of contemporary art available to the public. They created a Foundation that bears their name and gathered a collection made only with donations from artists of international prestige, all of them friends and colleagues.

The Stämpfli Foundation building was inaugurated in 2011, thanks to the transfer of the Fish Market by the City Council. In 2019, the facilities were expanded with the addition of a new building in Carrer d’en Bosch, fully remodeled. Currently, the Stämpfli Foundation - Contemporary Art has six exhibition rooms equipped with the necessary conditions of an international exhibition center, a restoration, conservation and storage room for works not exhibited to the public, 'a space for documentation and an auditorium.

The collection The fund of the Stämpfli Foundation consists of one hundred works and thirty in deposit, corresponding to 65 prestigious artists of twenty different nationalities, who have generously donated their works to the Foundation for friendship with Peter Stämpfli.

The generating nucleus is made up of works by a new generation of artists who in 1964 departed from the abstraction and informalism of the 1950s and opted for a new figuration known as Narrative figuration, born in Paris in 1964 at the hand of the exhibition Everyday mythologies in the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.

They were moments of social change in which society was making its own the logic of consumption based on the mass production and distribution of goods. A group of young creators used the power of images multiplied everywhere, through new languages such as those of advertising, cinema, comics, photography and television, to create a new figurative aesthetic.

Artists who make up the collection of the Stämpfli Foundation:

An installation of 11 flags designed by Peter Stämpfli in the 90s takes the center stage in the Foundation's new proposal

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