The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is happy to present OR OR OR?, one of the most significant exhibitions ever held by Swiss artist Raphael Hefti.

An engineer by training, Hefti is passionate about the properties of materials and industrial processes. The experimental work he has developed over a number of years, in collaboration with scientists and technicians, derives its creative strength from the mistakes and miscarriages of industrial manufacturing.

For this solo exhibition, Hefti has created two site-specific installations that resonate with the venue’s industrial past, since the building that now hosts the Centre d’Art Contemporain was where the Société d’Instruments de Physique (SIP) had its workshops up until the end of the 1970s.

Various Threaded Poles of Determinate Length Potentially Determining their Determinacy* comprises hundreds of one-metre steel, aluminium, titanium and copper bars made using precision engineering machines. All of the bars have undergone various industrial treatments, including heating, in order to test the physical limits of each material. Working experimentally, the artist has wrought an aesthetic transformation to reveal the unsuspected beauty of these metals, as opposed to industry’s utilitarian and commercial undertakings. For the second work, Raphael took three aluminum plates and covered them with powdered iron. After heating with gas burners, the plates reveal abstract shapes whose motifs are enhanced by the play of LED lighting.

Raphael Hefti combines random elements with technology and the imaginary joined with scientific experiment to create poetic installations that open up new possibilities for plastic media at the frontier between art and science.

An exhibition catalogue has been published by JRP|Ringier, with contributions by Alex Farquharson, Adam Szymczyk and Harry Burke. Exhibition curated by Andrea Bellini

Raphael Hefti was born in 1978 in Biel (CH) and lives and works between Zurich and London. He attended the Ecole Cantonale d‘art de Lausanne (ECAL) and the Slade School of Fine Art, London.

Curated by Andrea Bellini