The Particular Place / Der besondere Ort

Rémy Zaugg was an artist of international importance who lived and worked in Basel and Mulhouse. By his own understanding he was a painter, yet he did not confine himself to the production of pictures. Rather, out of his painterly practice he generated general assumptions for a processual understanding of the work with which he examined spatial, architectural and urban contexts in a new and unaccustomed way. Accordingly, the perceiving human being as a member of society always stood at the centre of his reflections – all his aesthetic assumptions issued in the emancipatory idea of the subject "in the making." Alongside his extensive painterly and written oeuvre, his activities and projects for and in public space are therefore essential to an understanding of Rémy Zaugg's particular artistic position.
The book is devoted to this socially relevant complex of themes; it documents all of the artist's realised and unrealised projects in this field and focuses in particular on the following areas of his work: museum architecture (above all his collaboration with Herzog & de Meuron), exhibitions with works by other artists, art in public space, and his engagement with artistic methodology, cooperation and the concept of the work, an engagement uniting theory and practice. The artist was a friend of Herzog & de Meuron and also worked with them on questions of urban design. Gerhard Mack's informative interview with the two architects is brought to a close by Jacques Herzog, speaking of the space the two of them acquired from Rémy Zaugg for their art collection: "It is simply wonderful that he is close to us and will still radiate something when we ourselves are no longer here. In that sense it is also an homage: a place where Rémy is present. At the same time, though, the space with its whole complex history also refers to us; it is like a kind of key to our own work."