“(…) Muriel Baumgartner’s self-portrait, on the other hand, may seem like a stark contrast, although the titular ‘Inner Diameter’ of this solid wooden bust also makes reference to a cavity. The object is bulky and very present in the entrance area, its concealed face carved into a piece of wood that is riddled with cracks and inclusions, worked to varying degrees of precision and incorporating multiple stylistic elements. The artist’s temples are adorned with mannerist curls emerging from a seemingly natural ponytail, there is a medieval quality to the fringe above the forehead, and whereas the rough upper arms and chest still bear traces of the chisels and chainsaw used on them, the hands are highly elaborated, almost naturalistic in effect. This mixture of styles is slightly chilling, but the artist’s approach here is hardly arbitrary; it is a deliberate exploration of a craft she has acquired through self-study, intentionally losing herself in stylistic references from a long history of sculpture. The work references classic portrait sculpture while depriving us of its core function and asking the question instead as to what opportunities there are for sculpture in the contemporary art world. Meanwhile, the gesture of the hands that conceal the artist’s face also hints at another level of meaning, with the self-portrait oscillating between seeing, not-seeing and not-wanting-to-be-seen. Created over a one-year period, this sculpture represents moments of introspection and artistic self-reflection in equal measures.”


Marc Munter 2010

Whether they are located in Lima, Manila, Lesotho or in the forests of Calais (where illegal immigrants had been waiting for seven years for a chance to cross the English Channel before the French police cleared their camp in September 2009): shanty towns are media-compatible symbols of poverty, characterized by building standards halfway between makeshift tent camps and crude brick buildings. These symbols have also come to represent the range of circumstances, such as natural disasters, that can uproot people and force them to live in such dwellings, sweeping them from their rural communities into the urban periphery. If we apply this setting to the city of Berne, we would have refugee camps springing up in places like the undeveloped peri-urban Aar Valley where the new inhabitants would be threatened by natural phenomena such as landslides or floods. The installation entitled Shanty Town, Standardized also alludes to the architectural trend of redeploying a proven building formula again and again, with little or no variation. All around the world, single-family detached homes are particularly well suited to be built as ready-made objects in more or less uniform suburban developments. With their standard format, they appear almost as industrialized and clinical as shipping containers. This kind of architecture is totally interchangeable, site- and location-unspecific and therefore quite affordable, fulfilling mass-market desires of home ownership. The realization of these dreams, however, is one cause for the rampant land consumption in Switzerland. Adversity and affluence are at opposite ends of the spectrum of human impact on nature and the environment, and our standardized slum serves as a silent reminder of both of these tendencies.


Patrick Klötzli und Muriel Baumgartner 2010

The title of Muriel Baumgartner's work Zustand II – seven photographs that are consecutively projected far up onto the unplastered wall – results from the very pedes- trian circumstance that it is wedged in between the two installations Zustand I and Zustand III (both from 2009) within a small series of works. However, one could also deliberately ignore this fact and take the title in just by itself. For it is invariably a second state – and not the original state – that Baumgartner is interested in. And her artistic strategy always involves the transformation of an object through appreciative misreading.
Nor was there a need for her to become creatively active for this. For Zustand II it sufficed that she photo- graphically isolated seven different load-bearing columns of a building undergoing demolition. By zooming in, the remnants of metal reinforcement are transformed into branches, if you will, and the top of the column which really was formed quite haphazardly by the wrecking ball becomes a stork's nest. What interests Baumgartner about the subject of the ruin is less the patina of modern- ist architecture, by means of which an artist like Cyprien Gaillard tries to draw a line between Modernism and Postmodernism, but rather the boundary between built civilization and nature.
Zustand II does not function according to the tried and tested principle of artistic work that imagines the terri- tory held by civilization being recaptured by nature. Baumgartner merely capitalizes on the fact that a wreck- ing ball and a stork's beak can quite unintentionally pro- duce very similar architectural results – despite the pro- found difference between the two instruments in terms not only of form, but of symbolic power as well. On the one hand we have the instrument of demolition that, as a linguistic metaphor, is at the same time made responsi- ble for all kinds of material and immaterial destruction, and on the other there is the stork's beak that carries newborns to their parents, no less. Thus Zustand II is not just a state between Zustand I and Zustand III: it is also a situation between de- and construction, between end and beginning and, eventually, between birth and death.


Daniel Morgenthaler 2010, text in the exhibition catalogue "Yesterday will be better", Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland

Nowadays, the ‹made› in ‹readymade› may be taken somewhat more literally. The actual activity, the ‹making› of a readymade, no longer merely consists in simply placing an object into an unmistakable art context, but also in actively and unabashedly manipulating the object. For her 2009 work "Untitled" Muriel Baumgartner has turned an umbrella inside out in the way normally only caused by a strong gust of wind. Moreover, without adding any additional materials, she disassembled and reas- sembled the components in such a manner that the objet trouvé in the end resembles less an umbrella than a folding contraption for drying laundry.
While in Baumgartner's group of works State I through III each individual work stands for a particular state, here there is a conflict of competence within one and the same object, since an umbrella only works when it rains, while a drying rack only works when it is dry. However, a compromise was already arrived at: the triangular panels of fabric of the umbrella now simply hang out to dry like funeral pennants. The process of newly acquired functional freedom is coming full circle: the umbrella may no longer protect from rain, but on the other hand it does dry faster; at the same time the black fabric takes up the entire length of clothesline, preventing other laundry from being hung on it.
As a result, the object serves all the more effectively as a projection surface for less obvious associations. Thus, it also faintly resembles a small tree that has been affected. But while the columns in Baumgartner's State II seem to be awaiting storks, on this little plant ominous ravens would clearly cut a better figure. For the same reason it would fit well into the gloomy stage set for Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which according to the stage directions includes exactly one tree. Particularly since the original object, the black umbrella, is a highly theatrical object and should not be missing from any costume stock – just like the black bowler hat that plays an important role in Beckett's play. Both props are also – along with the pipe – part of the iconic imagery of René Magritte. In the end, therefore, Baumgartner's umbrella object only lacks a function inasmuch as the theater of the absurd and surrealism lack meaning.


Daniel Morgenthaler 2010, text in the exhibition catalogue "Yesterday will be better", Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland

"Upgrade Yourself." Nintendo, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Amiga, Bell, Toshiba—these are just a few names of global IT companies using slogans like these to advertise for their products and solutions throughout the world. Especially for international enterprises, slogans play a pivotal role in creating quick ways for consumers to identify with their brands. The purpose of these slogans, however, seems to be less and less about highlighting specific product qualities or creating a factor to differentiate a particular company from the competition. In fact, slogans make use of simple linguistic patterns supercharged with metaphors and the vague promise of transcendental values that seem to suggest a particular "lifestyle". Taken out of their context of the fast-paced world of commerce, they not only reflect our basic human needs but also paint a picture of consumerism that is as exaggerated as it is excessive, a world where the only desirable and worthwhile values are self-fulfillment, productivity, profit and attractiveness.

Thousands of such slogans served as the basic material for Muriel Baumgartner's installation, "How many companies would you bleed for?", created especially for this exhibition. By returning them to their pure, original form and turning them into poems—parts of a potentially continuous narrative of consumerism—she has created a purposeful assemblage and enabled a new way of reading these slogans. The logic of rearranging them as poems is powerful enough to compact the shared "values" of consumerism into a pathos formula. Through constant use of imperatives directly addressing an anonymous recipient, the rhetoric of power, control, self-aggrandizement and transgression of boundaries becomes ever more apparent, clearly taking on traits of totalitarianism. Visualizing and emphasizing this interpretation with her installation, Muriel Baumgartner has staged the exhibition space as a resonator, transforming the existing "sacred" authority of the white cube into a truly cultish space.

Born in 1976 in Zurich, Switzerland, Muriel Baumgartner graduated from the Zurich University of the Arts and has had numerous exhibitions in Switzerland. Her works are often characterized by their site-specific nature and she likes to use the format of an exhibition to develop new ideas in response to pre-existing local conditions. Her methods of execution include a multitude of artistic and technical practices, from targeted spatial interventions to the production of entire aesthetic environments.

Martin Waldmeier 2011, exhibition leaflet for "Im Angesicht der Tatsache" at Stadtgalerie Bern, Switzerland