Walter Pfeiffer

Inspired by the illustrated alphabets found in abecedariums, this new book on Walter Pfeiffer (born 1946) presents playful and illuminating insights into the Swiss artist’s practice from A to Z, annotated by Pfeiffer himself. The book also features new texts reflecting on five decades of Pfeiffer’s artistic output from an international group of curators, critics and writers. At once a meticulously crafted artist’s book and a comprehensive monograph, Walter Pfeiffer demonstrates the artist’s sustained commitment to exquisite, innovative publications.
This book is part of Swiss Institute’s newly redesigned SI Series. Each book in the SI Series adds context through seminal essays, archival materials, event transcripts, artist portfolios and exhibition documentation, as well as reprints and new translations of important texts.

Walter Pfeiffer is now a world-renowned photographer. Although he began his artistic career as a draftsman, Pfeiffer’s drawings are known to precious few. So this book is an overdue overview of his graphic work, continually engaged in a fertile dialogue with his photographic work. In the early 1970s Pfeiffer produced large-scale hyper-realistic pencil drawings that served as points of departure and even working models for his photographs. This style gave rise to personal works as well as Pfeiffer’s legendary posters for the Zürich Filmpodium, magazine illustrations and commissioned portraits. Beginning in the 1980s and especially in the ‘90s, Pfeiffer gave up photography for a time to focus on drawings in China ink, colored pencils and watercolors, in which the elegant free play of lines and colors moves into the foreground: intimate portraits of beautiful boys and the artist’s close women friends, still lifes and flowers. These pictures are characterized by a cheerful, wakeful sensuality, sure lines and alternation between graphic reduction and a taste for rich ornamentation. This publication is not a conventional retrospective, but a stand-alone artist’s book in which to discover the vivacity of his drawings and a new Walter Pfeiffer.

Walter Pfeiffer's Scrapbooks from 1969 to 1982 are a very unique Wunderkammer. Pfeiffer's polaroids and photographs alternate with miscellaneous objects newspaper clippings, postcards, packaging, tickets and brief punning notes. Pfeiffer assembles all of this into a large collage full of surprising references and comparisons that is both a visual diary and creative foundation of his artistic work. In his Scrapbooks, Pfeiffer's keen view of Eros, Zeitgeist and popular culture, his disrespectful humor as well as his appreciation for the poetry in the mundane and banal, are sharply revealed. They offer a view into Pfeiffer's meandering and playful universe and are a contemporary document that captures the Zeitgeist of the 1970s and 1980s with ephemeral elegance.

Zurich artist Walter Pfeiffer presents us with more than 100 portraits of women in his new book Cherchez la femme! Most of these photographs are being published for the first time and show a new facet to Walter Pfeiffer's rich oeuvre. Pfeiffer celebrates his quest for beauty and glamour with sophistication, irony, and wit. He guides you through a world residing between reality and reverie, snapshot and mise-en-scene. With simple means he creates intelligent and classic images of beauty and bliss, imbued with a wistful awareness of their artifice. Stylish, suggestive, and erotic, his images create an encyclopedia of desire. Clever and elegant, Walter Pfeiffer's photographs elude classification and create a world of their own, thereby suspending the viewer between the being and seeming. The photographs spurn the indexical gesture of documentary photography, invested, as it is, with solemn intensity and mired in the delusion of a one-to-one rendition of reality. However, they are equally wary of wallowing indiscriminately in the phantasmagoria featured in the elaborately staged photography of recent years. Instead, Pfeiffer's recent pictures are utopian variations on reality that undercut the blunt documentary assertion of factuality with the narrative "once upon a time" of a fairy tale.

Walter Pfeiffer, whose work in the 1970s and 1980s prefigured many of the decisive developments in contemporary art today, is a classic artist’s artist—famous and beloved among art aficionados, yet almost forgotten by the public at large. Now, it’s the time to discover him as his images seem timelier than ever. Welcome Aboard! Photographs 1980–2000 is, at the same time, a monograph on Pfeiffer’s photographic work and an artist’s book, a photo-novel all of its own. Pfeiffer takes you on a long trip from suburban bliss to the horse race at Ascot, from wind-swept beaches to majestic mountain tops. Pfeiffer knows our dreams and artfully plays with them. In his still lives, landscapes, and portraits of beautiful boys and mischievous women, Pfeiffer celebrates his quest for beauty and glamour with sophistication, irony, and wit. Pfeiffer leads you in a world between reality and reverie, snapshot and mise-en-scene. It’s a photo album from Arcadia. With simple means Pfeiffer creates intelligent and classic images of beauty and bliss, imbued with a wistful awareness of their artifice. Stylish, suggestive, and erotic, his images are an encyclopedia of desire.