Printed
The artist Werner Gadliger combines two passions in one person. As a photographer, he is an explorer of the real world, eliciting surprising moments from it with his camera. As an artistic draughtsman, he explores inner worlds, conjuring up images from hidden depths on paper with his pencil. Six photo books and four art books published to date bear witness to this.
In 2024, the Fondation Auer Ory pour la photographie publishes the Carnet n°39 to accompany Werner Gadliger's solo exhibition in Hermance-Geneva (September 5 to October 30, 2024), 64 pages with 61 b/w and color photographs, texts by Alexandre Fiette and Michèle Auer Ory.
Werner Gadliger's first monograph is published in 2021, under the title «Nebenschauplätze». It comprises 480 pages with over six hundred black and white and color illustrations taken over the last five decades in Switzerland and around the world. Essays by three authors complement the pictures. The sequence of images, which is deliberately not arranged thematically or chronologically, focuses on the unspectacular in Gadliger's documentary photography. Whether in Basel or Buenos Aires, Riehen or Rijeka, Zurich or Zadar, Gadliger focuses on small scenes on the roadside, everyday oddities and chance encounters along the way.
For a long time, it was the originals, oddballs and outsiders among his fellow human beings that fascinated photographer Werner Gadliger. They are the focus of his first two publications. The artist portraits, which have taken up a lot of space in his photographic work over the years, show a different kind of original. Benteli-Verlag published a selection of his artist portraits in 2013 in the volume «Im Atelier und unterwegs – Künstlerporträts». In 2011, Waldgut-Verlag publishes «Vom Süden her kommt ein Herz auf Stelzen», with photographs by Werner Gadliger and poems by Nora Iuga. The photo books «Begegnungen» from 1977 and «Fotografien» from 1979, both in the Edition werga, are out of print.
The two media of drawing and photography are only alien to each other at first glance. On closer inspection, similarities emerge, for example the sophisticated use of light and shadow, positive and negative, contour and contrast of black and white. Werner Gadliger's delight in the moment also inspires him as an artistic draughtsman when «developing» his pictures. In the 1982 volume «Traumfahrt», Gadliger's etchings are enriched with commentaries by personalities such as Arik Brauer, H.R. Giger, Garance and Arnold Kübler. The books «Augen-Blicke» with drawings and etchings followed in 1985, «Nachtbubenwerk» in 1988 and «Flugwetter» in 1990.