Albrecht Schnider
Landschaft
2009

With text fragments and 37 lithographs by Albrecht Schnider on Zerkall mould made paper, 145 g/m², hand-bound, embossed, 29.7 x 39 cm, 68 pages.
The lithographs were printed in the Steindruckatelier Thomi Wolfensberger lithography workshop, Zurich. The hand-made bindings were produced in the Atelier für Grafik-, Foto- und Schriftgutrestaurierung Michael Rothe, Bern.
Print run of 25 numbered copies. Five additional artist's copies not intended for sale carry the numbers EA I–V.
An edition with 3 two-tone lithographs was produced in connection with the artist's book. Other publications on Albrecht Schnider in Verlag Rothe Drucke: 380

Collections of sketches are fascinating in their own right: they provide an insight into the workshop and the thought-processes of the artist; they reveal how he or she approaches a subject and retrace the process we call creativity. At the same time, however, they remain somewhat mysterious to the beholder because the processes in question are not continuous but often erratic and associative. The secret of the creation of a picture is not revealed.
This is true of the "Albrecht Schnider Landschaft" collection of sketches. The artist, who lives in Berlin, visited the Wolfensberger lithography workshop in Zurich several times over a period of six months. The result is an arbitrary and chronological collection of the artist's lithographs – and of what concerned him – over a period of half a year. The sketches are not the basis for a finished work but instead show how Schnider approaches the subject of landscape, how he creates and discards visual topography, how he measures distance and proximity as well as the relationship that constitutes a landscape from front and back. One thing that is immediately noticeable is that, at the end of the day, landscape is an abstract topos.
When Schnider paces out the landscape in this way, he makes use of a motif on which he focused in his earlier works. It has now become the foundation of his creations in that the focus is no longer on the landscape per se but on researching the effects of lines and areas, strokes and empty spaces, with the aim of achieving what we perceive as a landscape. The result is that "Albrecht Schnider Landschaft" is a book about searching, questioning – and perhaps a key to the rest of his works.

Konrad Tobler