Gaudenz Signorell is a magician of the photographic image. He has been absorbed in visual research since his beginnings as an artist at the end of the 1970s, and while doing so has taken photography to its limits. Photographed reality is by no means a benchmark for him. His work frees itself of any representational function and first and foremost involves the photographic image. This is subjected to an intensive editing process and thereby increasingly gains a momentum all of its own. Photography becomes an equivalent of reality. Gaudenz Signorell confronts the visible world with internal images. He uses the power of recollection, and with visual means enhances the expressiveness of emotion. He interferes with the materiality of photography, toils away, and experiments like an alchemist in the darkroom. However, he ultimately disengages himself from all concreteness, in order to transpose the image and to lend it a mysterious aura.

The first major survey of Gaudenz Signorell’s artistic oeuvre traces the impressive journey of an ongoing analysis regarding the photographic image. Born in 1950 the photo artist from Graubünden has been working persistently for more than 40 years on a unique connection between the outside world and his inner life and has created images of great expressive force. His work is influenced just as much by his extended stays in Rome, Paris, New York, Cuba and India as it is by his concentrated work secluded in his studio in Domat/Ems.