HENRI MAILLARDET
HENRI MAILLARDET is an exclusive watch and jewellery brand that uniquely combines the classic value of gemstones, technology, and the extravagant self-expression of an artistic ego. Under the slogan "Return to Exclusivity", the essence of Henri Maillardet's creations can be defined by their inspiration through art.
Henri Maillardet (1745-1830) was a Swiss avant-garde mechanic and artist who produced watches and other mechanisms in London. He created several songbirds, automated animals (the caterpillar, the frog) or the automated writer - The Juvenile Artist. Around 1800 Henri Maillardet built this extraordinary automaton, which has the largest "memory" of such a machine ever constructed - four drawings and three poems. Machines, like Maillardet's "Automaton", bear witness to mankind's efforts to imitate life by mechanical means - and are fascinating examples of the intersection of art and science, beauty and material, invisible and tangible splendour.
The HENRI MAILLARDET Art Society recently opened a space for art concepts on the prestigious Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich. This space offers talented artists a first-class platform for presenting their art. The art company HENRI MAILLARDET combines expertise in exclusive jewellery and watches with a passion for art in a new "Art meets Luxury" concept.
Artists at the fair:
Francisc Chiuariu
Gheorghe Fikl
Franzisk Chiuariu
Henri Maillardet presents Franzisk Chiuariu (born 1966), one of the most important contemporary Romanian painters, who became famous after the fall of the communist regime. A prolific artist and former professor at the Bucharest University of Art, he has concentrated exclusively on painting over the past 30 years.
Chiuariu is a fervent and fearless explorer of various forms of visual expression, who has developed a unique creative identity characterized by the mixture of traditional media and unconventional materials, techniques, or surfaces. Over a period of three decades, Chiuariu's artistic practice has produced a multi-layered combination of Photorealism and Neo-Expressionism, with his most recent series "Vortex" moving firmly into vast abstract territories, sometimes reminiscent of Richter.
He works in oil and acrylic with typographic ink, on canvas or translucent polymer plates, with light boxes and occasionally with video. His recurring themes are the dissolving human presence in urban landscapes, the fleeting visual appearance of the powerful underlying network geometry that supports our emotional interaction with subsequent people, history, and spiritual experience.
The Vortex series has produced several large-format canvases that deal with famous urban places, which for the artist are associated with personal and historical memories.
After important local and international exhibitions, his works have been included in the Romanian Museum of Contemporary Art MNAC and in private collections in Romania, France, Russia, Switzerland, Israel, Canada, Austria, the United States and South Africa.
Francisc Chiuariu: Morning Glory (Times Square, the Vortex Series) / Oil on canvas, 155 x 206 cm, 2017-2018 (Courtesy of Henri Maillardet, Switzerland)
Gheorghe Fikl
Gheorghe Fikl (born 1968) is one of the most original and thought-provoking contemporary Romanian artists, firmly established as a master of neo-baroque. Interestingly, his early artistic practice in the 1990s focused on conceptual mixed media installations, working with found objects, photography, and his own painterly interventions.
In what he describes as natural inevitability, he gradually moved towards a powerful form of the figurative, exploring the imagery and symbolism of animals and decadent spaces. An artist of extraordinary imagination and skill, he developed large-format paintings, strange Dadaist compositions in which the unexpected contrast of visual narratives destabilizes and fascinates the viewer at the same time.
In Fikl's theatrical and disquieting universe, the animals are at the centre of attention: these haunting and gentle creatures - bulls, peacocks, horses, dogs, sheep or butterflies - are, in their mysterious presence, the strange inhabitants of surrealistic spaces with aristocratic marble floors and run-down farmhouse walls. Their underlying violent, disquieting power and hedonism offer as many contexts for reflecting on the inherent tension of our human existence in historical and personal time.
This new aesthetic soon became Fikl's trademark, making him known to art critics and collectors in Romania. Several solo exhibitions followed in Luxembourg, New York, Lisbon, and London, opening his work to a worldwide audience. His 2017 exhibition at the Ajuda National Museum in Lisbon was a turning point, presenting the artist in a highly visible international context.
Since then, Gheorghe Fikl's works have been represented in important private collections in Romania, the United States, Portugal, France, Italy, Andorra, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom - including the Transylvanian collection of the Prince of Wales, the Bonte Foundation, the Maria Nobrega Foundation and the Gordon Watson Collection.
Gheorghe Fikl: Toulouse (Sheep) / Oil on canvas, 204 x 270 cm, 2019 (Courtesy of Henri Maillardet, Switzerland)