About
Giuseppe Reichmuth (born 1944 in Affoltern am Albis, Canton of Zürich) is a Swiss painter and artist. He does not belong to a movement of art, because he chooses his style depending on his subject. Reichmuth's only fixed attribute is humour.
The first and probably best-known painting is Zürich Eiszeit (English: Zurich ice age), which caused a scandal in 1975. It apocalyptically shows, in a photorealistic way, a frozen city of Zürich full of ice and snow: Ice age is loose, sheets of ice lie between old historical buildings. There is even a warship, that got stuck in the ice, and a group of penguins. If you look closely, you will notice the last "penguin" is actually something else... ;~) The work was interpreted as a criticism on the supposedly fossil and cold state of Zurich; a state, that the 1980s movement of youths and writers like Fritz Zorn criticised heavily, too.
In a very similar way, the painting Dinosaurier auf der Autobahn (English: dinosaur on the freeway) was made. Afterwards, the style of Reichmuth started changing and became more and more miscellaneous. Reichmuth participated theatre projects in Baden, e.g. the Jerry Dental Kollekdoof. He got to know Ruedi Häusermann and did a lot of performances with him. In Bleu et gentil (1985) they dressed up like policemen and walked through the streets hand in hand.
Also provocative was Reichmuthps painting of a vicious, smoking pope and the performance, that included hanging laundry on a lot of wires through the areaway of the university. In German, there is a figure of speech that says "dreckige Wäsche zu waschen" ("to wash dirty laundry").
Together with Roman Casanova, Reichmuth painted his Hin- und Herbilder: One of the two painted a picture, this picture was photocopied and sent to the other artist, who repainted it more or less (but never totally) and then copied again and sent it back – from March 1997 on until the end of 2003. The result is 83 paintings, that were exposed together.