The exhibition “Literary Towers” dedicated to Peter Wüthrich (1962, Berne) involves Christian Stein and Galleria Fumagalli. Galleria Fumagalli presents three exhibitions on its two floors: the first, on the ground floor, highlights the work of the artist closely linked to disciplined abstraction in which the book, maniacally taken as subject, is highlighted in monochrome or bichrome geometric compositions placed on the walls. In these works the surface of the book, the cover, gives the color, which shows all its vivid beauty. In the basement the gallery exhibits the photographs of the Litterary Towers series in which the artist, acting on the imagination and the mood of the dream by activating the typical thought’s system of switching by analogy, makes the book look like a tower, a palace, a skyscraper. The third exhibition brings together a group of recent works: Verbum (1999), Horizont (1996), Tiegel (2003), Der Idiot – Planet (1997) and others.

To the question «why are books at the centre of your interest?» The artist replies: «I am attracted to books for a literary passion: everything that happens in the world sooner or later ends up in a book, past present and future, the book for me is an aesthetic object, but it is also full of meanings… everything belongs to the literary world… ». A single installation takes place at Galleria Stein: Peter Wüthrich reconstructs a “bedroom”, where each object has a strong relationship with the book so as to be constituted by it, at least in part. What defines the space/environment and allows us to glimpse the work, anticipating it with the usual translation of roles and “personification” of the book-object in another, is a curtain made of silk bookmarks, knotted together; a repeated dense verticality introduces the public to the “literary bedroom”.

The literary glossary invests the bed: sheets and blankets are taken from Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov; the television transmits a video in which the artist walks carrying a book on a leash; in the wardrobe several boxes present a page of a book from Marcel Proust to Charles Baudelaire and Emile Zola, instead of the food label; black books are perched on a rod up to the ceiling. In all these works the detachment of the author is perceptible: he does not disdain the ironic component and, highlighting the freedom of the imagination, is able to change the object’s shape and use.