Presented at Lo schermo dell'arte Film Festival 2014

The work of the St. Gallen Art Foundry is divided between Switzerland and China, and might be defined as a partnership between artisanal mastery and artists’ ideas. Artists such as Urs Fischer, Katharina Fritsch, Fischli/Weiss and Paul McCarthy have created pieces under the guidance of the foundry’s charismatic founder Felix Lehner, and his young workforce. The foundry is a hub where art and craft co-exist, where ancient techniques interface with hi-tech processes. The film enters the factories to show the production of several large- and small-scale pieces, among them Katharina Fritsch’s famous, controversial Hahn/Coq, the blue cock, created for Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth.

Iwan Schumacher 
Born 1947 in Luzern, lives in Zurigo, he taught photography at the Bath Academy of Art in England. Co-author (with Adrienne Burrows) of a monograph on the English psychiatrist and photo-pioneer Hugh W. Diamond, he photographed the series of clay sculptures, Plötzlichdiese Übersicht, by Peter Fischli & David Weiss, for a publication with the same title. In 2000 founded Schumacher & Frey GmbH. Together with Patrick Frey, developed and produced the weekly TV series C’est la vie! for SF DRS. 

Selected Filmography
2011 Amiet 2010 Urs Fischer 2007 Markus Raetz 2005 Der Wolkensammler: Jean Odermatt

schumacherfrey.ch