By choosing the title "Between Expression and Gesture" for her Vaduz exhibition, Nesa Gschwend inaugurates a space of which the two concepts are, as it were, the antipodes, even as they constitute the two sides of that space, inseparably, interdependently connected. The remarks below are an attempt to investigate this space, and to examine the points of contact in her oeuvre between expression and gesture.

Nesa Gschwend's entire corpus is built upon action. Her artistic career began with theatre and performance; but although her work as a visual artist also has its roots in these early preoccupations, the boundaries and transitions are open and fluid. The performances give rise to objects and installations, while drawings and objects, for their part, may be included in a performance. These are images or representations of an epistemological inquiry into a boundary the quest for which has been a constant in the history of ideas: the line that separates the human subject from the world that subject experiences as "external". Gschwend's work focuses on the human being as a creature seeking to understand itself and its environment in everything it does: by means of its agency, its intimacy, its cognition and its apprehension.

Her art is shot through with the palpable, the tangible; with touching, with physical encounters and confrontations with objects and substances, with transformations and with processes involving penetration, appropriation and internalization.

Corinne Schatz