Roman Signer

Roman Signer (*1938 Appenzell, CH) is known for his use of 'lively' materials, including air, water, fire and explosives, which often give rise to action sculptures that the Swiss artist then photographs or films. In Letzter Schnee, snowballs form an orderly queue at the top of a “ski slope” that they descend one by one. This act of role-reversal, in which the last of the snow descends a bare, manmade slope, wittily questions received notions of civilisation and nature during a thaw or, in today’s overarching context, the climate emergency.  

The dash of surrealism that is often present in Signer’s work returns in Paddel, which could be interpreted as the opposite to an action sculpture. Yet this artwork too possesses its own idiosyncratic set of tensions: a traditional source of motion frozen in time, wood encased in metal. The themes remain the same: time and material. Signer’s drawings shed further light on his unique genre of “time sculptures”, which continuously play with notions of permanence and ephemerality, suspense and spontaneity, motion and immobility.