Hans Danuser

After working in Zürich for the German advertising and fashion photographer Michael Lieb from 1972 to 1974, Danuser began experimenting with light-sensitive emulsion at the ETHZ Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

[8][9] The series of works consists of found and staged stencil paintings, created by means of paint-spray cans on different supports, at the intersection of public and private space.

Danuser is interested in the approaches and models used in taking decisions as a social and political instrument, ranging from mathematical theory to the practical counting-out rhymes of children.

[6] The rhymes – "a mixtum compositum of reason and imagination"[11] – are as significant as mathematical formulae and physical laws inasmuch as they are grounded in “nonrational processes of taking decisions”[12] and therefore reflect the fundamental structure of contemporary models of thought.

Günter Metken writes in the exhibition catalogue: “Without being explicit, Hans Danuser's work addresses the classical problem – and paradox – of painting: the perception of nature and its reproduction, the tension between surface and depth, volume and two-dimensionality, foreground and background, microscopy and totality, vision and the sense of touch.

Our gaze wanders, roams, follows winding shapes in an ecstasy of sensual expansion and refinement.”[13] 1988 found Danuser for the first time showing the pictures in the Architekturgalerie Luzern under the title Partituren und Bilder (Scores and Pictures), which he had been commissioned to photograph by the Pritzker prizewinning architect Peter Zumthor in 1986–1988: the Atelier des Architekten (Architect's studio) in Haldenstein, the Schutzbauten über römischen Funden (protective pavilions above Roman finds) in Chur and the Kapelle Sogn Benedetg (Chapel of St. Benedict) in the Surselva region of Canton Graubünden.

And instead of reducing the phenomenon to a photograph, he as it were dismantled the building into its component parts, like a short film, which breaks the subject down into sequences and shows it from different perspectives; today one would call this performative.

These fragments offer the observer the opportunity to reconstruct the building in the imagination.”[14] Danuser worked for ten years on seven series of images, which he compiled in 1989 under the title In Vivo and presented to the public for the first time at the Kunstmuseum Aarau; the exhibition was curated by Beat Wismer.

Depicting a variety of workplaces in research and production facilities, the work affords insights into taboo areas of late-industrial Western society without showing the people themselves.