State of Mind

Artist, author and publisher Philipp Keel was born in Zurich. After his studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and the HFF University of Television and Film in Munich, he moved to California and worked in a variety of artistic media. Keel's photographs, paintings, drawings and silkscreen prints have since been shown in numerous international exhibitions and are present in leading collections.
In collaboration with the printer Don Weinstein and Epson, Keel has developed the Imbue Print, setting a new standard for large format artists' inkjet prints. In 2003 Steidl published Color, the most comprehensive monograph of Keel's Imbue Prints. A selection of his color photographs can be seen in the exhibition catalogue AISA – Images of an Imaginary Continent (Edition Judin). His early work in black-and-white is showcased in Look at Me (Edition Stemmle / Abbeyville Press). His book series All About Me (Crown Archetype) has sold over three million copies worldwide. It was followed by Keel's new series Simple Diary (Taschen) which playfully features his philosophy. In 2012 Keel succeeded his father Daniel Keel as publisher of Diogenes Verlag in Zurich.

“Keel often works in series, as he engages with certain themes over a period of many years. His drawings and paintings capture remembered images in a way that also conveys a sense of the transience of memory. As memories made visual, as the fleeting impulses of the past made concrete, these drawings activate an awareness of time. They are records of specific experiences that open onto the general horizon of a collective past. They are a protest against forgetting. (...) The act of drawing in the practice of Philipp Keel is not confined to the studio alone but is often an effect of his displacements, into the city, into the landscape, into other spaces, into other states of mind.”
Hans Ulrich Obrist