In the mid-1970s, a young artist gave herself the programmatic name “Manon”. She stirred up the Zurich art scene with her appearances as a femme fatale, provocative performances and installations, exhibited men in a shop window or presented her bedroom, overflowing with lascivious decor, as a salmon-coloured boudoir (Das lachsfarbene Boudoir) in a gallery.

Manon is a screenwriter, set designer, director and actress, but also a photographer. Using the camera as a tool, she still works on self-portraits and still lifes to this day. She constructs her pictures with compositional sensitivity, plays with subtle references to art history and pop culture and simultaneously expresses existential desires and fears. Manon’s photographic œuvre is a showcase of beauty and transience, most prominently represented by La dame au crâne rasé, the legendary series created in 1977/78. The heroine of this dreamlike photo-novel, who is androgynous and sexy, vulnerable and yet detachedly cool with her shaved head, notably resurfaces in her later long-term project Hotel Dolores.

Fotostiftung Schweiz presents Manon classics alongside lesser-known works, combining early series with photographic tableaus from recent years. In this exhibition, which was already planned for 2020 to mark the artist’s eightieth birthday and had to be postponed due to corona, it pays tribute to an internationally groundbreaking oeuvre.