Now she's alive again in the Engadin valley, where her husband Gian is coming from and where you for 20 years, lived together. After that, the artist drew a couple of Pedretti in the lake. To your 90. A birthday celebrates the Bündner Kunstmuseum in Chur, Erica Pedretti in collaboration with the New Museum Biel with an exhibition. In 1984, with the Ingeborg-Bachmann-prize, and in 2013 for her life's work with the Swiss literature prize-winning writer has also as an artist, made a name for.

Already in the ' 70s, the former a silversmith, wire racks, of considerable span to forms, you plated a part with a "skin" made of plexiglass solution, or other materials. began Strange "winged creatures", as Pedretti called you, when you looked at your creations, as if they were your creepy. You act like animal relics, which is a drag, especially because they are neither fish nor bird, in a spell. With these objects symbolize the fly and crash, captured the artist's own visions and Fears.

The artist and writer Erica Pedretti in her Studio in La Neuveville, Switzerland, recorded at the 26. January 2005. Photo: Gaëtan Bally (Keystone)

With the creative force of your hands Erica Pedretti expression for Urgefühle not find that they bound to the limitations of the language. Because of creative, literary Writing can create images and contrapuntal contexts, and as little can deny that it used the language of a Medium that works with a specific meaning ciphers and understanding the importance of the aims.

art can be set, however, is also a symbol for something you (initially) no words. With space and landscape installations on the theme of Migration and asylum, the artist switched later, but also in current debates.

feeling of "being Foreign"

The inadequacy of language and mistrust her, because you can have as much to disguise as statements, definitely influenced from the beginning Pedrettis literature. The writer was soon a feeling of "being Foreign" exposed: in the world – and in the language, even if English was your familiar.

in 1930, as Erika Schefter (with a K in the first name) in the Moravian Sternberg was born forced her family after the Second world war, evacuated, although the father was anti-fascist. Because of her grandmother father's side is Swiss roots, came the fifteen-year-old with her brothers and sisters, in 1945, with a red cross Transport in Switzerland. In Zurich, she attended the school of arts and crafts.

But with the welcome of the parents, the family had to leave the country in 1950, because she had no permanent residence permit. After two years in the United States, the young woman returned, married the painter Gian Pedretti, you should have five children, learned Roman, and first settled in Celerina. In 1970 she published in the Suhrkamp-Verlag, where also their other books published, her first work, "Harmless, please." The title was an ironic Understatement, because of the mere harmless strength Erica Pedretti told never.

As a writer she takes her memories and the present was the occasion, to you – in writing – screened for their truth content. If in doubt, trust the gap. The difficulty experienced history of language to capture, in her book "Saint Sebastian" (1973) to the compositional System"Out with the language! Why I hesitate here, why I continue to write not easy?" asks the Narrator in the history of the band, "sunrise, sunsets" (1984).

In the relentless light

Pedretti integrated into your text is always what you "happens during the writing". In the novel, "change or The destruction of the child Karl and other people" (1977) deals with you after your move to the lake your new country's strangeness, by reflection of her own life in the circumstances of a stricken family, she meets.

An important work in Pedrettis Valerie or The unerzogene eye is "Create". Irritated by Hodler image cycle on the dying Valentine Godé-Darel, puts you in a cancer woman that is your Lover, a painter, model. The more she observed him, the more she questions the mechanisms of their relationship and the function of art. Life and death seem real, and in the artistic surrogate – in a new, merciless light.

The 1986 published book about a growing alienation met with, especially in younger women who thought about feminism and culture, with much interest. At the same time, this writer and artist seem to show that professional creativity and family life do not necessarily exclude must.

With your watchful eye on your surroundings and your own, but also with your compassionate nature, Erica Pedretti to Do, although you are urged never in the foreground, to become a prominent personality of the Swiss literature and art. "Foreign enough" is the title of your latest publication from 2010, in which you can look with stark, get him to sketch on your life back. And "foreign enough" is also the title of the Chur exhibition.

exhibition "Erica Pedretti – foreign enough" at the Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur to 7. June.

Created: 10.03.2020, 14:11 PM