Manon, winner of the prestigious Meret Oppenheim prize in 2008, is today considered the most important representative of performance art in Switzerland, and a major artist of the European avant-garde in the early 1970s. She studied decorative arts at Saint-Gall before settling in Zurich to join the Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique. Her wide-ranging artistic production includes environmental and sculptural works, performances and installations – all related to photography, which occupies a central position in her work. With a deep feminist awareness Manon, unlike her contemporaries of the 70s, does not aim to provoke or take a militant stand; her work falls instead within a phantasmagorical sphere in which lust and role-play mingle in a dreamlike, sometimes even nightmarish world. Her life is her art and her art is her life: “I didn’t want to make art; I wanted to be my own work of art!” she said once. A quest for beauty strongly pervades her work, supported by an awareness that this object of desire can only tend toward ruin.

Determined to break free of the confines of her role as a muse (to her second husband, Urs Lüthi), Manon’s first act as an artist was to present, in 1974 in Zurich, an installation representing the site of her life and loves, Das lachsfarbene Boudoir(The Salmon-Coloured Boudoir). Many of the following pieces were performances featuring herself, such as Lola Montez. WithManon Presents Man, she exhibited seven men corresponding to her fantasies in a Zurich art gallery, like Amsterdam prostitutes posing in window displays.For The Artist Is Present she travelled from Zurich to Lucerne with 16 young women, all in her image. The mirror was broken. Then came a long period of photographic work, all staging herself with the same sophisticated erotic flair, a lustful and extravagantly glamorous feminism borrowing from the feminine side of David Bowie and the masculine side of Marlene Dietrich. From 1990 she began to make more sculptures and installations, increasingly in contemplation of disease and death. OSMOSCOSMOSpresents an excerpt from the 1982 Doppelzimmer series showing her with her third husband,Sikander von Bhicknapahari, a photographer’s assistant, producer, coach, digital assistant and more, in a reversal of the role of the nude model.