Agenda

L’ Association de l’Espace culturel Assens presents the exhibition Liber. L’essence du bois.

The show brings the works of the artists Chantal Quéhen and Jérôme Blanc together. Both share a passion for wood.

Chantal Quéhen works with ink, collage and engraving. She makes installations and objects and creates unique books about her art speciality. Chantal Quéhen moves her objects of art, poetry and literature. In 2019, she founded the Atelier du Piaf (www.atelierdupiaf.ch), based in Yverdon-les-Bains (Canton of Vaud).

Jérôme Blanc (www.jeromeblanc.ch) is interested in wood, bronze and glass and the illusions generated by various sculptures made of these materials.

Both are worldwide renowned artists.

From the middle of the 19th century, with the rise of tourism, railways, construction of tunels and other industries, Switzerland became a country of immigration.

Until the (oil) crisis of 1973, millions of Italians lived and worked in the country for short or long periods, including in Canton Vaud and Lausanne in particular.

They profoundly influenced the culture and many other facets of Switzerland.

The ‘italianità’ can be felt in music, food, nightlife, sports, language, cinema, trade, business, and many other areas.

The exhibition (Losanna, Svizzera, 150 ans d’immigration italiènne à Lausanne, 150 years of Italian immigration in Lausanne) puts this immigration of over 150 years into perspective.

The story of Lausanne is symbolic of other cantons, cities and villages in Switzerland.

The sculptor August Gaul (1869–1921) is considered a pioneer of both animal sculpture as an autonomous genre and modern abstraction. His sculptures depict zoo, domesticated and farm animals as beings with individual character and pulsating liveliness.

Gaul lived in times of drastic transformations Industrialisation and increasing urbanisation from the end of the 19th century onward also affected the relationship between humans and animals.

With more than 250 sculptures, paintings, prints and drawings, photographs and books the exhibition presents his oeuvre in dialogue with contemporary works of art and testimonies from science, and popular culture.

This contextualisation illustrates the modern redefinition of the relationship between human beings and animals, an issue that still has overwhelming relevance today.