Before last week, I had never heard of the State Art Academy in Zürich. Then, I saw the exhibition Artifacts from the SKZ, on view at Municipal Bonds in the Dogpatch, featuring student work from the now-defunct art school, alongside drawing horses, tables, easels and smocks once utilized in its classrooms. Since that visit, I can’t stop thinking about it.
The SKZ was founded in 1990 and trained roughly 27,000 students before shuttering in 1999. It would appear that the school modeled itself on the once-radical principles popularized by the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 30s, promoting modernist ideals of geometric abstraction with the goal of creating an objective utopia through accessible and affordable art and design.
The resulting paintings, each titled for the student signature scrawled across the bottom of the canvas, are easy on the eye, if a little dated-looking, even for a 1990s curriculum. The craquelure quality of the monochrome forms, often contrasting or complementing each other on the same canvas, makes them seem far older than that, closer to the period of the Bauhaus aesthetic they emulate.
It’s Mondrian with an Ellsworth Kelly twist, at once delightfully and reproachfully minimal. The paintings raise the question: Is there anything here?
The classroom detritus, reminiscent of Swiss artist Dieter Roth’s sculptural installations of segments of his studio floor, made me wistful for my days at the also-defunct San Francisco Art Institute. There’s a gossamer magic to the accumulation of marks made on these sorts of shared surfaces — a communal yet anonymous experience of meaning-making. Put a pin in that.
