photo basel 2024

Patrik Fuchs is a photographic collector. Fascinated by the visual commons of our living worlds, by the trust towards the familiar. He traces the everyday, at home in Switzerland or on extended journeys across the continent. In the "ordinary" Fuchs searches for the typical, the aesthetic peculiarities, the beauty and the breaks.

For his series "Wetterseite" Fuchs portrayed barns which are part of everyday life in Switzerland. They stand by the roadside or alone in fields. As functional buildings for storing the harvest or agricultural implements, they point to an original economy that saw the land not as building land but as fertile land. The ongoing urbanisation of Switzerland has therefore given barns the ambivalent dignity of upright losers. As farm buildings, they are mostly buildings of low status, and yet with their simple and typical forms they have shaped the landscape and thus the self-image of Switzerland.