Date: 2013

Overbeck-Gesellschaft (Contemporary Art Society) Lübeck, Germany. 17 November 2013 – 19 January 2014 (extended 2 February 2014).

In the quest for an optimised body that incarnates beauty, wealth, health, and success, a growing number of individuals across social sectors are engaging in practices of body modification. With the advances in medical research and the popularisation of surgery, the body becomes a luxury item, a malleable design matter, which can be sculpted, sucked, lifted and invested into.

These issues inform the new works by Swiss artist Christoph Zellweger who was born in Lübeck. Under the title ‘rituals of self- design' the exhibition articulates an analogy: the relation between home improvement and body improvement (the optimization of one’s own body), which is also home of the self.

On show are various artworks, photographs and hybrid objects of strong materiality that pose questions on norm, pressure to conform, freedom of choice, aging and the voyeuristic public gaze. By merging the visual languages of the domestic and the clinical, Zellweger quotes the grammar of modern design in a critical manner.