JugendFotoPreis [CH]

Website

To encourage young people to venture into the world of visual arts, we organised a photography competition for the youth of Toggenbourg and neighbouring regions.

All those between the ages of 12 and 16 (students of secondary school) were invited to submit a maximum of three photographs for each of the following categories:
portrait, light, my life.

An independant panel judged the photographs and the best 10 images of each category are exhibited from November 2018 until the end of January 2019 at the Gallery.

The winners are as follows:
Category Light:
1. Leoni Rüdlinger, 2. Lara Berger, 3. David Widmer
Category Portrait:
1. Jasmin Widmer, 2. Kristijan Munegato, 3. Nuria Gaudenz
Category My Life:
1. Laurin Bleiker, 2. Leoni Rüdlinger, 3. Anastasia Grütter

You can read more about the event here (in German only):
Tagblatt - Jugendfotopreis 2018

Philia Schneider

St. Gallen, CH

Raku Objects

Already Philia's grandmother worked with clay and created beautiful pottery. On a trip to Japan in 2010, Philia became acquainted with clay herself. Since then, she has been honing her skills and her ability to express herself with pottery.

Philia burns hand-made tea cups in a raku oven, creates sculptures and other art objects. In between, she practices turning beautiful bowls at the potter's wheel. Important inputs for her come from friends and specialist seminars at the Lehmhuus in Aesch, where Philia draws inspiration from various European and Japanese artists.

She ventures along the path of Aikido with Peter Shapiro Sensei. The Way of Tea and the Music of the Shakuhachi, as well as the sculptures of Arp and Giacometti influence her pottery.

Gabrielle Gern

Lichtensteig / Zurich, CH

Images and objects

Gabrielle Gern (1957) lives in Lichtensteig and Zurich. Since she can remember, she has loved drawing and painting. From 1983 to 1986 she attended the Zurich School of Applied Arts (Kunstgewerbeschule).

Today, collages and assemblages are her favorite means of expression. She knows how to combine different elements together, as if they had always belonged together, to create something new. You will find a fine sense of humour and a pinch of profundity in her pictures and objects.

Christine Seifert

Lausanne, CH

Mixed Media, christine-seifert.com

Christine's nomadic life is mirrored in her work.
Soon after she was born in Bamberg Germany in 1954, the family moved lock, stock, and barrel to a coffee farm on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania in 1957.
It is there that she spent her childhood, in the wilderness and with horses. She attended a boarding school in Nairobi, Kenya, and what followed was a life of moving: from East to South Africa, to Europe, and back to Africa.

Christine taught herself photography and sketching, and in 1987 studied at the Schule für Kunst und Gestaltung in Zürich. This experience encouraged her to step out into the world as an independent artist and to deepend her work.

With her paintings she experiments with different forms of expression. She also sculpts and enjoys working with graphics.

Since 2003, she has been represented by a number of galleries - from the UK to Europe and Africa - and her work has garnered international recognition and collectors.

Blind wine tasting experience

Julia Leijola, anthroenology.org

Discover a different way to taste wine and travel through the South African wine regions with anthroenologist Julia Leijola.

We will be blind tasting three white and three red wines as well as an orange wine. These will be conventional, biodynamic, or natural wines. The tasting will be done blind so that participants can focus on what they are actually tasting without being influenced by their knowledge of or assumptions about the wine in question.

Saturday October 14th 2017 from 4 until about 6pm.
Registration required.
Please e-mail julia@anthroenology.org with your details (number and name of participant(s)) to register for this event.

Price: 20CHF per person
Max. amount of participants: 20.

Registered participants will be invited to arrive shortly before 4pm so that the event can start promptly.
No previous knowledge of wine tasting is required.

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Anthroenology is an anthropological research project on wine and issues of sustainability, morality, and the redefinition of taste.
The project asks a deceptively simple question about consumption and political economy: when beliefs or ethics come into conflict with taste or similar expectations, which one wins, and why? Or, asked in a slightly different matter: how do our beliefs about the world affect the way we taste? The project is thus concerned with key issues in contemporary economic anthropology, but does so through a lens that we believe to be unique: the intersection of beliefs and the actual sensory experiences of consumption.

You can read more about the project on the Anthroenology website.

Yvonne Wertli

Winterthur/Schönengrund, CH

Aquarelle painting, wertlishome.ch

Yvonne started drawing at an early age and her skills were recognised already at school. She continued learning about drawing and painting on her own, dedicating it to her passion for dogs.
In 2003 she met Albert Schmid per chance who took her on as an aquarelle colour student and taught her the technique of wet on wet. Looking for another artist to learn from, she found Christian Schäfer a few years later and has been painting in his atelier since 2011.

Ulrich Sambeth

Effretikon (ZH), CH

Oil painting, sambeth-painting.jimdo.com

Uli Sambeth was born in 1959 in London. He was brought up in Geneva and sudied Geophysics at the ETH in Zürich. From an early age he has been interested in stones, mountains, and volcanoes in particular.
Thanks to a small house in Toggenburg, which serves as his family's refuge, he feels attached to this hilly region.
He has been painting with aquarelle colours for a long time and thanks to the help of an artist friend has been also painting with oil for some time. Next to his busy job, painting allows him to find quietude, balance, and a sense of satisfaction.

Fanny Trommer

Neuchâtel, CH

Handmade lamps and decorative objects, latelierdesidees.ch

Fanny Trommer is originally from France and has lived in Neuchâtel for almost a decade. Her passions in life are creativity and science: she holds a PhD in Neurobiology and infuses her creative work in the atelier with her experiences at the laboratory.
Self-taught, she enjoys experimenting with various materials and is always looking for new ones to work with.
Fanny sees light acting as a revealing agent: by penetrating the layers, the colours, and the volumes, it unveils the heterogeneity of the materials in their entirety. Creating a lamp is creating a living object, which tells its own story.

Ron Hurst

Rapperswil-Jona, CH

Artist - painter, ronhurst.com

Ron Hurst was born in 1943 in Jackson, MI, USA and moved to Switzerland in 1972. His father discouraged him from living the "destitute life" of an artist despite Ron demonstrating artistic talent early in life. Since 1997, and after a career outside of art, he has pursued the life of an autodidact, honing his artistic skills thanks to workshops and literature.
He works with oil and acrylic. For him, painting is the pursuit of the self in relation to the world he lives in. Be it realistic portraits, landscapes, or sociocritical pieces (beautiful paintings of ugly things), he aims to create passionate responses and to communicate with a feel-good, aesthetic appeal.

Noriyuki Shimizu

Kyoto, Japan

Ceramist

Noriyuki Shimizu is from Nagahama, Japan, and has been working as a ceramist for 40 years. He trained at the renowned Kiyomizuyaki kamamoto in Kyoto.
He is inspired by the rich natural earthen tones that surround his house. He prefers using the colours that fill the natural world around us since these are the colours we never tire of: they provide a sense of warmth and tranquility.
He makes his glazes out of natural materials: pine ash, rice straw ash, and soil, which he blends himself to create the perfect texture and colour for his glazes.