Over the past 35 years, Jules Spinatsch has created an extensive body of work that has been exhibited, collected, and published both in Switzerland and internationally. The exhibition at the Art Museum Graubünden presents the broad media spectrum of his works as well as his artistic approach. The artist transfers both his own and found visual material into publications, image series, photographic installations, and video works. Starting from a documentary approach – “from what is, not from what should be” – Spinatsch explores the possibilities of photography: on site from direct observation of social events to the use of semi-automated recording processes that combine seemingly opposing principals such as chance and control into new forms of imagery. Places such as the Vienna Opera Ball, the WEF in Davos, software companies, nuclear power plants, prisons, winter sports events, or bubbling mud pools in Iceland, become his fields of research. At the Art Museum Graubünden, the artist creates a presentation on the second basement level that introduces a new spatial dramaturgy. Spinatsch invites viewers – while also challenging them – to think about questions of perception, of power and control, as well as of their construction and representation through media images. In so doing, he examines issues of authorship and copyright while simultaneously revealing the potential, the limitations, and the instability of photographic images.

On occasion of the exhibition, a two-volume publication by Roma Publications is issued including the large-format photo book pitalismus ist ill as well as a reader: On Jules Spinatsch, featuring art historical texts and essays.