The first comprehensive monograph on the work of Swiss artist Raphael Hefti is published on the occasion of his solo exhibition Salutary Failures at Kunsthalle Basel. With a career spanning over a decade, Hefti is celebrated for upending and disrupting—seemingly ordinary—industrial and post-industrial processes. Hefti’s intimate encounters with materials take form in colossal sculptures, performances that (at times) flirt with the brink of disaster, and sprawling public interventions. Often operating under the light of Murphy’s Law, he unveils everyday things so well hidden in plain sight (and turns the principles of minimalism on their head).
This richly illustrated volume captures the artist‘s complete body of work through his process of making in factories across Europe to their installation in museums and galleries. With contributions from a diverse cast of authors—a philosopher, a science-fiction writer, and an art historian among others—Hefti‘s material transformations come to life in saturated words and images that tell stories of error, risk, and wonder (from the scale of the particle to the universe at large).
Every copy of this book is unique. The distribution of pigments is the result of their manipulation during screen printing, and no two covers are alike. Printed by the artist at collaboration with Atelier für Siebdruck, Lorenz Boegli, Müntschemier, CH.
