Dominique Kaehler Schweizer

«Dear Food Afi cionados, Meat Lovers, Gourmands and Gourmets: you are about to be served by Dominique Kaehler Schweizer – aka Madame Tricot: an opulent feast for the eyes and virtual tease of your taste buds, she tempts us carnivores with delicacies ranging from Saucisson to Cordon Bleu. She has smoked, stuffed, marinated and made sausages, put beef through the meat grinder, constructed tureens and pies, tied up strip loins, plucked chickens, hung slabs of bacon and prepared pigs’ feet.»
– Gabrielle Obrist

«Knitting art is a guarantee of inner peace and happiness »
– Madame Tricot

«Perhaps Eat Art just asks questions and is therefore infinitely curious, eager for everything that is new, interested in everything that is edible or seemingly edible, even worms and insects, or bulking agents for that matter, those culinary placebos that give you that deceptive feeling of fullness. Eat Art is even interested in the dietary extremes of anorexia and bulimia. It is convinced that the human being – no longer fi tting into the cosmic order of things – cannot but forever ask the wrong questions and give the wrong answers.»
– Daniel Spoerri

Pâtés and pigs’ trotters, an exquisite cheese platter and luscious ice-cream bombes: with her unmistakable signature style, the exuberant artistic installations by Madame
Tricot, alias Dominique Kaehler Schweizer, transpose the viewer into an illusory world of knitted delicacies. Her smokehouses, refrigerators and displays of sausages are witty and ironic while the knitted human heads and anthropomorphic specimens confront the viewer with the breaking of taboos and surreal allusions.
The installation-like stagings represent a balancing act between fine art and virtuosic craftsmanship. With this the affiliation to the object art of Pop Art and Nouveau Réalisme is found within the freedom of her creations.
Her impeccable knitting technique, on the other hand, bears witness to intricate craftwork and is reminiscent of the knitted artefacts that have been part of European
design culture since the Middle Ages.
The artist’s mises en scène – fittingly photographed by Daniel Ammann – are unique: full of wit and unambiguous analogies to the still-life painting tradition. The works by
Dominique Kaehler Schweizer simultaneously link to the work of the Eat Art movement of the 1960s, and associations to the work of Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth and Fischli/Weiss are particularly contiguous.
Divided into culinary categories, in Delicatessen by Madame Tricot the reader roams a fascinating world of knitted illusions. A special kind of ‘sumptuous feast’ that will capture the imaginations of both gourmets and art lovers.