With "New Position I", Häusler Contemporary Zürich launches a new series of solo presentations by young international artists who exhibit for the first time in Switzerland. Entitled "Zauberberg", the inaugural exhibition presents sculptures and videos by the German artist Marco Schuler (born 1972).

Video is a recurring medium in Schuler's multifaceted work, which revolves around notions of physical strain and testing one's bodily limits. Shot from a single, fixed camera viewpoint and without an audience, Schuler's videos resemble experimental set-ups, while the intensity of the artist's efforts and his expressive gestures are frequently reminiscent of rituals. In this sense, his videos could be said to have a model character, which explains why the artist refers to them as a kind of basic research or a sculptural alphabet that informs the language of his three-dimensional work.

In Schuler's sculptures, however, the artist's body is often substituted with figurative elements, which are then invested with a symbolic function. By either reducing or massively increasing the scale of their components, Schuler's sculptures confront spectators as autonomous artefacts.

Marco Schuler's sculptural pieces often focus on a feat of strength, putting to the fore the notion of overcoming material and physical limitations. The tyre sculptures shown in this exhibition are composed of two roller tyres that the artist has diverted from their original function by cutting them up, pulling them on top of each other and fastening them with metal screws. Schuler's exhausting struggle with the material has thus produced autonomous pieces of abstract art.