The crossover of scientific knowledge and artistic forms of production has a long tradition. Whereas in the early modern period, with the type of the artist as universal scholar and engineer, there was still an actual exchange between the two disciplines, art and science have taken separate paths in the course of progressive specialization. This separation seems to be becoming more permeable again today: More and more often, science makes use of visualization strategies and imaging techniques that also follow aesthetic criteria. Conversely, artists are increasingly resorting to the thought and working forms of science in order to make them fruitful for their own work. Supposedly static systems of knowledge become the starting point for works that make use of these systems in order to break through and question them. Artistic work no longer revolves solely around the artist subject, around parameters such as work, object and exhibition, but is examined in its interaction with other systems of knowledge and in its function.
With works by younger Swiss artists as well as important older and international artists, this publication and eponymous exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Solothurn open up a wide range of different approaches and thus offer an insight into the diversity of the subject. “Science & Fiction” aims to show how artists question and reflect on science as a way of explaining the world from their own point of view, and how they juxtapose artistic practice as a model and possibility of knowledge production.