Galerie Peter Kilchmann

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Adresse: ab 1.4.2011: Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zahnradstr. 21, 8005 Zürich

Text written on the occation of 15 years Gallery Peter Kilchmann, 2007

Some companies hang up a world map tacked full of colored pins in their head offices. The pins mark their branch offices, joint ventures and other successful moves of expansion. Peter Kilchmann, our focus of attention how-ever, is not the head of a global affiliated group, but a gallery owner. His office is decorated with works of art, such as photographs, drawings and paintings. Yet if there would be a world map, it would be peppered with pins after 15 years of gallery activities. The blue and yellow ones would mark partnerships with other galleries as well as participations at art fairs and the locations of private and institutional art collectors. These are, unsurprisingly, scattered over the continents. Along with the pins representing the collectors and the gallery's most significant brands, the most important pins would be the red ones: They stand for all the artists Peter Kilchmann works with. There would be a striking agglomeration in Latin America, especially in Mexico and self-evidently also in Switzerland, on the Balkans, in Germany and in the United States. And, something that is more interesting, there would always be single needles pinned into countries and cities off the beaten track. Take Derry, a town with 80,000 inhabitants in Northern Ireland.
Derry, Northern IrelandThis town is not a place where the art jetset would get astrayed to. Derry or, in the words of the protestant Unionists, Londonderry, had been one of the boiling points in the conflict of Northern Ireland. One date has remained a traumatic reminder: January 30th of 1972, when British soldiers fired into the demonstrating crowd and injured 26 unarmed civilians, mortally wounding 14. The whole world remembers this fatal Sunday as "Bloody Sunday". Artis t Willie Doherty , then 12 years old, had been the reason for Kilchmann's trip to the most Northern point of Ireland. The work of this Irishman is essentially characterized by the situation in his home town. This is what makes his works - large format photographs and videos - engaging: Doherty's questions about the possibilities of media representation are not only of aesthetic nature, but also of political explosiveness.
In 1990, two years before opening his own gallery, Peter Kilchmann came across Willie Doherty . Deeply impressed by the artist's works, he wished to organise the first gallery exhibition with Doherty in the autumn of 1992. The fact that Willie Doherty , then largely unknown, was nominated only two years later for the re-nowned Turner Price, attests to the gallery owner's acute sense which to date has been crucial.