Beat Streuli

Beat Streuli, a Swiss artist now living in Brussels, was born in 1957 in Altdorf. He decided to devote himself solely to photography in 1988, having studied painting in the art schools of Zurich, Basel and finally Berlin.

His initial photographic images followed the lead of Russian Constructivism, with letters, words and geometric elements making their way into his compositions. Gradually the outer world began to enter Streuli’s works, initially through collages, then with his first urban views. In 1994 he started working with video, filming street scenes in New York.

Although his work is a successor to Street Photography, it does not seek out the decisive moment or extraordinary event, prizing rather the trivial day-to-day reality of the big city. Striving to describe the inhabitants of the urban world, the artist captures both the rhythm of the crowd and the daily existence of solitary individuals. Each of his images is both specific to the city where it was taken and totally universal in its transcription of the incredible multicultural quality of our reality as city dwellers.

An influential figure both on the international scene and with respect to portrait photography, Streuli has shown his work in the most prestigious museums and art centres, notably at the Tate Modern in London (2008), Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum (2007), the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2002), Chicago’s MOCA (1999), the Kunsthalle of Düsseldorf (1999), and the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1996), where he exhibited for a second time in the 2009 show Objectivités. He has done numerous public commissions, including at the University of The Hague in 2006 and the Dallas Fort Worth airport in 2005.