Hans Danuser

Hans Danuser (born in 1953 in Chur) is a Swiss artist and photographer.

His first major work, the cycle In Vivo, brought him international fame, therein he broke several societal taboos with respect to genetic research and nuclear physics.

After working in Zurich for the German advertising and fashion photographer Michael Lieb from 1972 to 1974, Danuser began experimenting with light-sensitive emulsion at the ETHZ Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

Danuser is primarily based in Zurich.

The series of works consists of found and staged stencil paintings, created by means of paint-spray cans on different supports, at the intersection of public and private space.

In the 1980s Danuser embarked on his cycle In Vivo, completing it in 1989.

Contemporaneously he produced architectural photographs in the project Partituren und Bilder/Scores and Pictures.

They have been photographed since the 1980s in various cities in Europe and the United States.

1988 found Danuser for the first time showing the pictures in the Architekturgalerie Luzern under the title Partituren und Bilder (Scores and Pictures), which he had been commissioned to photograph by the Pritzker prizewinning architect Peter Zumthor in 1986–1988: the Atelier des Architekten (Architect's studio) in Haldenstein, the Schutzbauten über römischen Funden (protective pavilions above Roman finds) in Chur and the Kapelle Sogn Benedetg (Chapel of St. Benedict) in the Surselva region of Canton Graubünden.

The artist-cum-photographer was given carte blanche by the architect.

In his essay in the book ''Zumthor sehen.

Bilder von Hans Danuser – Nachdenken über Architektur und Fotografie'', Philip Ursprung, professor of contemporary art and architectural history, discusses the impact that Danuser's photographs in Partituren und Bilder exerted on the depiction of architecture in photography: “With his photographs of Sogn Benedetg, Danuser radically altered the conventions of architectural photography.

Instead of neutral documentation, he was interested in personal interpretation.

And instead of reducing the phenomenon to a photograph, he as it were dismantled the building into its component parts, like a short film, which breaks the subject down into sequences and shows it from different perspectives; today one would call this performative.

These fragments offer the observer the opportunity to reconstruct the building in the imagination.”

Danuser worked for ten years on seven series of images, which he compiled in 1989 under the title In Vivo and presented to the public for the first time at the Kunstmuseum Aarau; the exhibition was curated by Beat Wismer.

Taken in Europe and the US, the photographs in In Vivo are arranged in seven sections: A-Energie, Medizin I, Gold, Medizin II, Chemie I, Los Alamos, Chemie II (Nuclear Energy, Medicine I, Gold, Medicine II, Chemistry I, Los Alamos, Chemistry II).

Depicting a variety of workplaces in research and production facilities, the work affords insights into taboo areas of late-industrial Western society without showing the people themselves.

The images gauge the ambivalence of photography between documentation and fiction.

Since the 1990s, in addition to his photographic studies, Danuser has focused increasingly on transdisciplinary (research) projects in the arts and sciences.

Danuser has been invited to contribute to international events such as the biennales in Venice and Lyon.

He is one of the first photographers to have taken the conceptually compelling step of presenting his large-format tableaux on the floor in a museum exhibition.

In 1990 Danuser won the competition for the large-scale design of the walls at the University of Zurich-Irchel, which led to the Institutsbilder (1992).

The Frozen Embryo Series, made in the 1990s, a follow-up of In Vivo, also prefigured two ongoing works, The Erosion Project and Entscheidungsfindung – Decision taking.

Earlier works were seminal to the series, specifically Landschaften (1993–1996) and the art-in-architecture project Schiefertafel Beverin (2001).

The photographs in the Frozen Embryo Series (1996–2000) have their origins in medical laboratories and gene research.

These works find Danuser playing with the opportunities presented by analogue photography: he takes a single negative (which he calls the “original”) and, by turning and mirroring it in the darkroom, generates from it a number of other images, which he calls “one-offs”.

To reinforce this impression, Danuser chose the square as format for his images, slightly stretched to 140 cm x 150 cm. The Frozen Embryo Series was first shown at the Kunsthaus Zurich in 1996.

Günter Metken writes in the exhibition catalogue: “Without being explicit, Hans Danuser's work addresses the classical problem – and paradox – of painting: the perception of nature and its reproduction, the tension between surface and depth, volume and two-dimensionality, foreground and background, microscopy and totality, vision and the sense of touch.

The artist actualises these issues and yet his stream of drifting shapes reminds us of Monet's Water Lilies.

Our gaze wanders, roams, follows winding shapes in an ecstasy of sensual expansion and refinement.”

He later completed another project in an architectural context, the Schiefertafel Beverin (2000–2001).

'The project consists of three series: floor installations, Erosion I-VII (2000–2006); Modeling Erosion (2003–2007), created in collaboration with the ETH Zurich Institute of Geotechnical Engineering; and Landschaft in Bewegung/Moving Landscape (2008–), a collaboration with the ETHZ Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry as part of the research project Farbe und Fotografie/Colour and Photography.

By patenting "matographs," a new photographic process, Danuser pursued the goal of being able to "process [a] substrate with color according to [his] ideas before coating it with a photographic black-and-white emulsion (Sadkowsky 2018, 7), in contrast to commercially available photographic papers, which have a white layer support. Thus, at the turn from analog to digital photography, he succeeds in "introduce[ing] a new perspective, namely direct[ing] the photographer's gaze to the otherwise unnoticed background [of a photographic print]."(Folkers, 2018, 86).

The Counting Out Rhymes project on the subject of Entscheidungsfindung – Decision taking (work in progress) involves video stations and art-in-architecture.

Danuser is interested in the approaches and models used in taking decisions as a social and political instrument, ranging from mathematical theory to the practical counting-out rhymes of children.

The rhymes – "a mixtum compositum of reason and imagination" – are as significant as mathematical formulae and physical laws inasmuch as they are grounded in “nonrational processes of taking decisions” and therefore reflect the fundamental structure of contemporary models of thought.

The Erosion Project (work in progress) conducts research into the erosion of natural and cultivated landscapes which takes the shape of a clear, reduced aesthetic.

The ephemeral in the existence of the stencil images on physical substrates is taken up by Danuser's photography and transformed by means of digital image processing and sublimation printing technique on aluminum, into images that in their brilliantly reflective appearance, suggest ephemeral and digital screen surfaces (Peer 2019).

The Matographs – The-One-Million-Pound-Projekt (work in progress) was developed with the research departments of Ciba-Geigy (today Novartis), Basel, and Bayer Werke / Agfa Gevaert, Leverkusen (today AGFA).