Hannah Villiger

Born in 1951 at Cham (Switzerland), she died in 1997. 

Invited to exhibit at le Printemps de septembre, the artist Eric Hattan has also been entrusted with curating the exhibition of the photographic work of Hannah Villiger.

How did you meet Hannah Villiger?
Eric Hattan: I knew her work first, she was older than me, and she already had a name. Then we met in Basel in the early 1980s. But we were in much closer contact as from 1985-1986, when we were both residing at the Cité des Arts in Paris. We had adjoining studios, and that's where we started discussing our work. I wasn't one of Hannah's closest friends. After that we saw each other more spasmodically;
I went back to Basel and she set up home in Paris.

After her death, how did you happen to assume responsibility for her art work?
Eric Hattan: I've always exhibited other artists, especially when I set up the Espace Filiale Basel in Basel, and it's almost part and parcel of my own work. I'm not Hannah Villiger's legatee, all her works belong to her 15-year-old son, and her husband, who knows her work well but has no connection with the art scene. Her family asked me if I'd be prepared to deal with her work. Quite simply because we had a storeroom together in Basel, and I had the key!

What do you think is important about her work?
Eric Hattan: She had a very strong personality, very strict, and she was a great artist, whose work I really adore. She was a sculptor first and foremost, and she used her body in a “Skulptural” way the title of her first major solo show at the Basel Kunsthalle in 1985. In 1983, she photographed herself, and the furthest distance was the length of her own arm. Polaroids enabled her to control the result almost on the spot, and adjust her pose. Then she re-photographed them, and enlarged them, then exhibited them individually, or else arranged them in complex compositions titled Block. She also started to alter the meaning of the image: so she revolved around her own body, as if around a sculpture.