Teresa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler: Flora Redux

In the Swiss Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, the Swiss-American artist couple Teresa Hubbard/ Alexander Birchler presented Flora and Bust, exploring the life of the unknown American artist Flora Mayo, with whom Alberto Giacometti had a love affair in Paris in the 1920s. While Giacometti is one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century, Mayo's oeuvre has been destroyed, her biography relegated to a footnote in Giacometti scholarship. In this acclaimed work, which had its American premiere at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2019, Hubbard/ Birchler reframe Mayo's history through a feminist perspective that interweaves reconstruction, reenactment and documentary into a hybrid form of storytelling. Flora, a double-sided film installation, is conceived as a conversation between Mayo and her son, David, whom the artists discovered living near Los Angeles. The work generates a dialogue between a mother and son, Mayo and Giacometti, Paris and Los Angeles, and past and present. This richly-illustrated book depicts the journey of Hubbard / Birchler's process and is accompanied by the transcript of the film installation, a visual chronology of Flora Mayo's life and conversations with the artists.

Teresa Hubbard (Irish/ American/ Swiss, born in Dublin, Ireland 1965) and Alexander Birchler (Swiss, born in Baden, Switzerland 1962) have been collaborating as an artist team since 1990. Their work, primarily grounded in time-based media, aims to inspire sensorial interactions and explore connections between social life, history and memory. Hubbard / Birchler often seek engagement with adjacent fields of study that have more conventionally been considered the domain of the anthropologist, archeologist or historian. They represented Switzerland in the Swiss Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennial, presenting Flora in the exhibition “Women of Venice,” curated by Philipp Kaiser. Their work is held in numerous permanent collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; Goetz Collection Munich; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian, Washington, D.C.; Kunsthaus Zurich; Kunstmuseum Basel; Los Angeles County Museum of Art LACMA; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles MOCA; National Museum of Art Osaka and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.

Hubbard grew up in Australia and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, as well as the graduate sculpture program at Yale University School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut. Birchler grew up in Switzerland and studied at the Academy of Art and Design Basel and the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland. They began collaborating as artists-in-residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity and later completed graduate degrees at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada. Hubbard and Birchler are Professors at the University of Texas at Austin, where they lead the Photography & Media Program in the Department of Art and Art History. Hubbard / Birchler are represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin.