Roman Signer is a Swiss visual artist who works in sculpture, installations photography, and video. Signer’s materials tend to be the immediate utilitarian objects and Swiss landscapes that are a part of his lived experience, yet the manner in which he uses them is anything but banal. ‘Action Kurhaus Weissbad’ (1992) saw chairs catapulted out of a hotel’s windows; ‘Table’ (1994) launched a table into the sea on four buckets; ‘Kayak’ (2000) featured the artist being towed down a road in a canoe. In ‘Action in front of the Orangerie’, made for documenta 8 (1987), 350 stacks of paper were lined up in a field then exploded into the air to form a fleeting wall of paper some 15 metres high. In ‘Action with a Fuse’ (1989), he burned a fuse along the railway line from the town of his birth to that of his current home. The journey, from Appenzell to St. Gallen, took 35 eventful days.
‘I simply think with material the same way that a poet takes words and turns them into sentences.’ Roman Signer