Kunsthalle Zürich
Pati Hill: Something other than either

Pati Hill (1921-2014) was an extraordinary artist and writer, yet she is still scarcely known in Europe. As a young woman, Hill was a successful fashion model who made it all the way to the cover of the Elle. In the early 1960s, she began to create a conceptual and poetic oeuvre that spanned over 60 years and involved various disciplines. Though she received no art training, she was a pioneer of copy art and, since the early 1970s, used a photocopier as an artistic medium, creating hundreds of feminist works. In addition to her extensive xerographic work, she published four novels, her memoirs. and artist books, and also wrote poems and short stories.

In 1977, on a transatlantic flight, Hill met the legendary designer and architect Charles Eames, who through his consulting work for the IT company IBM finally gave her access to her long-awaited dream copier. With this office copy machine she reproduced household objects, diagrams, and book pages, using them to create visual essays on the relationship between image and language and the role of the housewife. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich, one of Deutsche Bank’s ArtCard partner museums, also presents her novels and publications in which she combined her texts and images to create small Gesamtkunstwerke. The design and self-publishing scene still reveres her for these works today.

Pati Hill:
Something other than either
until May 2, 2021
Kunsthalle Zürich