Private View 1980-2000
Collection Pierre Huber

A Genevan by adoption, Pierre Huber is totally into art. The dealer that he is was able to create conditions from which the well-informed collector that he gradually became knew how to construct an “oeuvre” made up of a very large number of pieces.

This collection, part of which will be revealed for the first time in Lausanne, comprises several hundred works that Huber collected as he went along depending on his encounters with and his discoveries of art scenes, their creators and artists, such as North American appropriationism (Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince etc.), German photography (Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth etc.), the Californian art scene (Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Jim Shaw etc.), Swiss art (Sylvie Fleury, Ugo Rondinone, Olaf Breuning etc.), as well as “neo-geo”, the Asian art scene etc.
One aspect of his activities gained support from the other without becoming confused throughout a dual “career” which developed in parallel for more than two decades.
Although Pierre Huber the dealer is today among the most important and most famous in his field, Pierre Huber the collector on the other hand is little known because he is invisible among the results of his business activity. It therefore seemed to us that the time had come to give him prime visibility by means of a publication and an exhibition. For the latter, we immediately ruled out any hypothesis of a classic treatment linked around various academic approaches.

A small section of the collection will be presented simultaneously at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, and in the galleries of l’elac (l’espace Lausannois d’Art Contemporain).
Rather than affirming the collection’s diversity and richness by means of sampling based on the fame of the artists and their representativeness as regards the artistic or national scene to which they belong, we decided instead to place greater weight on presentation of some of the monographic groupings that make up the collection or major pieces by some artist or other.
Even if everyone can legitimately expect to come across Mike Kelley or Franz West there, the exhibition – which in this respect reflects the collection – also holds some surprises and unexpected features in store.