Beat Zoderer CH, b. 1955

Beat Zoderer (1955, CH) predominantly uses everyday materials as a basis for his work. Inconspicuous everyday objects and materials from the DIY market are the components from which Zoderer combines his filigree works. PVC, building boards, rubber bands, or metal strips merge into radical optical structures, which can be surprising by their ease. Zoderer makes use of the materials within what at first appears to be methodical structures based on repetition or mathematical systems. However this is a deception, as each piece allows for an arbitrary element.  The play with the questioning of the visual conventions makes his art surprising and winning. 

During the largely spontaneous process of creating works, Beat Zoderer is guided by an attempt to create order in chaos. To facilitate this he sometimes draws on the formal language of historic works of geometric abstraction. The complexity of each piece consciously allows for imperfections and mistakes. It is this self-contradicting and ambiguous quality of the works that gives them the playfulness that probably best characterizes the artist and his work.

Beat Zoderer com­pleted an appren­tice­ship as an archi­tec­tural drafts­man and worked in archi­tec­tural offices from 1971–1978. Since 1979 he works as an inde­pen­dent artist. Two stu­dio stipends of the city of Zurich for Genoa in 1986 and New York in 1988 were fol­lowed by fur­ther grants from the city of Zurich. In 1995 he was awarded the Manor Art Prize and in 1998 he received an award from the Max Bill / Georges Van­tonger­loo Foun­da­tion, Zumikon/Zurich.

With his distinctive objects, paintings and installations, he is one of the leading artists of the Swiss art scene and has also made a name for himself internationally.