Andreas Züst (1947–2000) was a photographer, a painter, and an art collector; a social butterfly, a publisher, and a film producer; a bibliophile, a scientist, and a patron of the arts. Beginning in the early 1970s, he documented and photographed Zürich’s art and culture scene, transcending the boundaries between subcultures, high culture, and pop culture. It was with this same broad-minded spirit that he later became a collector and publisher of (art) books.
At the time of his death, Züst’s estate included an almost incomprehensible number of his own works, a collection of some 1,500 artworks, a private library of 10,400 books, and some ten thousand recordings (mostly vinyl records, but also cassette tapes and compact discs). Among these possessions, left at his Bachtel house, was also a collection of artifacts from the Arctic—the great passion of his last years. It included rare handwritten records, but also curios—scrimshaw and plastic figurines of polar bears. The house also contained numerous additional smaller collections—of magazines (“Der Spiegel”, “China im Bild”, “Billboard”); kitschy Nazi memorabilia; and meteorites of various sizes.
Today, Züst’s recordings and various smaller collections have been mostly scattered and disassembled. His daughter, Mara Züst, has supervised his artistic legacy since 2000. In 2002, the Arctic artifacts were sold at auction. In 2004, the art collection was put on permanent loan to the Aargauer Kunsthaus and, since 2010, Züst’s library, now known as the Bibliothek Andreas Züst, has been accessible to the public at its location in St.Anton Oberegg. In addition to regular exhibitions, various publications of his work and on the subject of his efforts have appeared.
This website is intended as an overview of the diverse breadth of Züst’s productions and collections, and as an attempt to make comprehensible the sprawling range of his work.
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