Zilla Leutenegger. The Smokers

Zilla Leutenegger (1968) lives and works in Zürich. She studied at the Chur Business School and later at the Zürich School for the Visual Arts. Before embarking on her artistic career in earnest, she worked for five years as a buyer for a fashion company, often visiting Hong Kong as part of her work.

Most of Leutenegger’s work is video-based and includes computer-animated sketches. The use of video and drawing endows her images with a hybrid quality that allows her to exploit an imagery inspired on fantasy. Through these video-drawings, Leutenegger offers a glimpse of her private world, and particularly of her childhood, which she intersperses with references to film, fashion as well as her own experiences, represented in the first person and often in intimate or everyday situations.

The artist’s predilection for simple forms is evinced in the work The Smokers (2004), recently acquired by the CGAC for its collection. The movements and gestures in this video-drawing are kept to a minimum but repeated ad infinitum. It shows three women (Annelise, from France; Olesya, from Russia; and Kathleen, from the US) quietly smoking a cigarette; three different kinds of women all lost in thought and introspection.

While Leutenegger’s pieces depict isolated actions, devoid of any wider context, the apparent relatedness of their themes and their power of suggestion may lead the viewer to suppose that these are fragments of a possible and as yet unconnected story.

In addition to The Smokers, viewers will be able to see two other pieces by Zilla Leutenegger: Quicksilver (2002) – also in the CGAC’s collection – and Lessons I Learned from Rocky I to Rocky III (2002), which belongs to the ARCO Foundation’s Collection.

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Zilla Leutenegger. The Smokers