The piece originally conceived by the duo Hubbard/Birchler for the Swiss Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennial reconstructs the life story of the American artist Flora Mayo. Mayo had a romantic relationship in the 1920s with the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti. While he is now one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century, her work was destroyed, and her life forgotten. Hubbard/Birchler reanimate Mayo’s gripping biography from a feminist perspective, linking reconstruction and documentation to form a multi-layered type of narrative. The catalogue, produced for the current exhibition at the Sammlung Goetz, explains the research the artists engaged in and documents the installation in an impressive manner.
The artists Teresa Hubbard (*1965 Dublin, Ireland) and Alexander Birchler (*1962, Baden, Switzerland) are based in Austin, Texas, and Berlin and have been working together since 1990. Their installations include sculpture, photography, and film. They first exhibited at the Venice Biennial in 1999.
