Beat Streuli
After studying arts and design in Basel, Zurich, and later in Berlin, where he lived for most of the 1980s, studio grants at the Cité des Arts and the Fondation Cartier in Paris, and the Istituto Svizzero in Rome, allowed him to stay in those cities practising urban photography. In the 1990s, he moved to Düsseldorf, where he discovered the large-format photographic work of the Bernd and Hilla Becher School at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, which so greatly influenced the formal language of his work. From then onwards, Streuli has been creating photographic tableaux of people walking in the streets, which he later projects, on a large scale, onto public spaces such as stations, parks, airports, hospitals, museums or even billboards. With a frontal photography of great formal unity, he has worked in many cities in the world, exhibiting photographic installations –especially translucid prints mounted on glass–, large-scale slide projections and video projections. Since the 2000s, Streuli’s work has focused on the presence of non-Western cultures in global Europe, mainly in the city of Brussels.
His participation in a group exhibition at MoMA’s PS1, New York, launched him onto the international arena. This was followed by a major exhibition at the Kunstmuseum, Lucerne (1993), his participation in a New Photography exhibition at MoMA, New York (1993) and an exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne, Paris (1996). Since then, his work has occupied billboards and public spaces in London, Amsterdam and Turin, as well as many other cities in Japan and the United States, and later India, Africa, South America, the Middle East and Asia. Most significant was the 160-metre-long wall installed at the entrance to the historic city of Petra, in the Jordanian desert, in 2008.
Works in the Collection
