SIKART Lexicon on Art in Switzerland | |
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Purpose | Online reference work on historical and contemporary art in Switzerland |
Edited by | Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK-ISEA) |
Located in | Zurich, Switzerland |
Languages | German, French, Italian, English |
Website | www.sikart.ch |
SIKART Lexicon on Art in Switzerland is the editorially supervised, regularly updated and richly illustrated online encyclopaedia of historical and contemporary art in Switzerland. SIKART is published by the Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK-ISEA), which is headquartered in Zurich.
SIKART provides information on artists in the field of the visual arts. This includes basic biographical data as well as details of artists’ fields of activity, exhibitions, publications and awards. Selected entries feature an article providing biographical information, an appraisal of the respective artist’s work as well as a selection of images. SIKART encompasses more than 17,000 personal entries, approximately 1,900 detailed monographic lexicon articles and almost 40 thematic articles about Swiss art history.
In addition to new basic personal entries, new articles by numerous specialists are published under the direction of the scientific SIKART editorial team on an ongoing basis. In the case of contemporary artists, their reception in the art world is decisive for the allocation of an article, whereas new research findings are decisive in the case of historical artists. Lexicon articles are assigned after thorough evaluation based on objective criteria related to public reception: publications, participation in exhibitions, scholarships and awards as well as acquisitions made by institutional collections.
The first encyclopaedia of artists published by the Swiss Institute for Art Research appeared in 1981 under the title Lexicon of Contemporary Swiss Artists. In 1991, SIK-ISEA published its first fully computerised publication: Künstlerverzeichnis der Schweiz 1980–1990 (Artists’ Directory of Switzerland 1980–1990 [KVS]). This evolved into the two-volume Biographical Lexicon of Swiss Art (BLSK), which was published in 1998. This standard work contains more than 12,000 brief entries on artists and approximately 1,100 detailed articles that include an illustration of one work as well as further references. The BLSK was the model for SIKART in terms of both concept and content.
SIKART Lexicon on Art in Switzerland was launched online in February 2006. Over the following decade, the user interface was slightly adapted with minor innovations. After extensive preparatory work for the new data modelling of the entire online inventory according to CIDOC CRM standards, SIKART was relaunched in 2021 and has been integrated in the SIK-ISEA research portal since 2023.
With branches in Zurich, Lausanne and Lugano, SIKART is based on the principle of territoriality, according to which the language region in which the artists live and work – or lived and worked – is decisive. In addition to articles in German, French and Italian, selected content is also available in English.
From 2006 until March 2023, all lexicon entries were divided into a five-level points system to reflect the public’s reception of the artists (‘editing depth’). The editors reacted to the fact that this visualisation of reception was repeatedly misunderstood as an editorial ‘rating’ by dispensing with the indication of editing depths.
SIKART is funded by the Swiss Confederation, the Swiss cantons, the city of Zurich and private donors. The website can be accessed free of charge, but at launch SIK-ISEA intended to charge for access at a later date so as to enable SIKART to operate independently of public funding. [1]
Mark Divo is a Swiss-Luxembourgian conceptual artist and curator. He organizes large-scale interactive art projects incorporating the work of underground artists. His work involves painting, performance, photography, sculpture and installation.
Ferdinand Hodler was a Swiss painter. He is one of the best-known Swiss painters of the nineteenth century. His early works were portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings in a realistic style. Later, he adopted a personal form of symbolism which he called "parallelism".
Uwe Wittwer is a Swiss artist. He lives and works in Zürich, Switzerland. The media he uses include watercolor, oil painting, inkjet prints and video.
Olaf Breuning is a Swiss-born artist, born in Schaffhausen, who lives in New York City.
Mario Pasquale Comensoli was a Swiss painter. He is considered as leading figure of the realist movement, depicting the social evolution of post-World War II Switzerland with key themes ranging from Italian immigrants to the 1968 social unrest, the Disco years and the hopelessness of the 'No Future' youth.
Swiss Standard German, or Swiss High German, referred to by the Swiss as Schriftdeutsch, or German: Hochdeutsch, is the written form of one (German) of four national languages in Switzerland, besides French, Italian, and Romansh. It is a variety of Standard German, used in the German-speaking part of Switzerland and in Liechtenstein. It is mainly written and rather less often spoken.
The Society for Art History in Switzerland is a Swiss learned society dedicated to promoting the understanding of Swiss art history and particularly of Swiss topography of art, including the study and maintenance of Swiss cultural heritage sites. The society, founded in 1880, publishes a wide range of monographs, guides, and inventories. These include the series Art monuments of Switzerland, which includes more than one hundred volumes, the first of which was published in 1927. It also publishes the quarterly journal Kunst und Architektur in der Schweiz.
François Barraud was a Swiss painter.
Stefan Haenni is a Swiss painter and a crime novel writer.
Leo Leuppi (1893–1972) was a Swiss painter, graphic artist, sculptor, and he was a representative of the Zürcher Schule der Konkreten. He was a founder of the avant-garde artists' associations Groupe Suisse Abstraction et Surréalisme and Allianz.
Manon is a Swiss artist. She produces installations, performances and photography. She first came to prominence in the 1974 with the installation The Salmon coloured boudoir. Her environments and photographic scenes are distillations of social change in the 1970s, sexual liberation, and the search for new roles. In photographic series such as Woman with shaved head and Ball of lonelinesses she addresses among other things the social construction of identity.
Geneviève Calame was a Swiss pianist, music educator and composer.
Eugène Alexis Girardet was a French Orientalist painter of Swiss ancestry.
Charles Wyrsch was a Swiss artist and painter.
Anita Spinelli was a Swiss artist, painter and drawer also known for her approaches to graphic work.
Hermann Bleuler was a Swiss engineer and artillery officer in the Swiss army.
Hans von Matt was a Swiss painter and sculptor. He was at the heart of an artists' network, known to some contemporaries as much for their fun-loving lifestyle as for serious artistic endeavour. He emerged as a writer on the arts and a "culture politician". He was born and lived in Central Switzerland.
Charles Joseph Auriol was a Swiss landscape painter.
Hans Brandenberger was a Swiss sculptor, and medallist. His work was part of the sculpture event in the art competition at the 1948 Summer Olympics.
Paul Armand Girardet was a French painter and woodcut artist of Swiss ancestry.