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Adrian Schiess Flache Arbeiten [Flat Works]
(1993, enamel paint on aluminum-composite panels, 300 x 110 x 2 cm each)
and video works (1989-99, DVD)

Photograph: Eva-Christina Meier, 2009, Marketinggebäude
[...] If that were indeed the case, then a collection like the Ricola Collection, whose focus has historically been on painting, would do well to swim against the tide. Instead of following the trend towards works that resist any obvious categorization, in other words, it would be better off retaining positions that are firmly anchored within the great painting tradition and promoting artists who likewise see their place there, even as they appropriate what they have learned from intermedia art forms and installations.

II.
What could this mean in practice? It could mean lending more weight to those works in the collection that reflect the experience and knowledge of other media in painting and so change our understanding of it. The art critic Terry R. Myers reminds us that painting has repeatedly been declared dead in one way or another ever since the end of the nineteenth century. In the early days of Modernism it was photography that was perceived as a threat. In the post-war period it was the advent of new art forms such as conceptual art, installations and digital media, while in recent years it has been the rapidly growing importance of the internet that has allegedly sounded its death knell. Since the 1970s, however, painting has proved itself to have the capacity to react to these changes not by setting itself apart from other art forms but, on the contrary, by entering into them, even if only tentatively and temporarily. [...]


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