M HKA Ensembles

° 1938

Lives in St. Gallen (), born in Appenzell ().

Swiss-born artist Roman Signer (°1938) is a veteran of the European conceptual/performance art movement of the seventies, and continues to assume a wholly unique position within the broader context of today’s globalized art world – if only for the consistency with which he has singled out the primordial natural elements of earth, fire, water and air (and the magical powers of transformation they denote) as the ongoing thematic obsessions, since the early seventies, of his idiosyncratic artistic practice. His oeuvre consists of a great number of so-called “sculptural events”: experimental actions and performances in which pseudo-scientific inquiry, boyish curiosity and absurdist, deadpan humour mingle to brew a unique, parodic cocktail not unlike that served up by Signer’s compatriots Peter Fischli & David Weiss, whose work shows the discernible traces, however oblique, of their peer’s influence.