The publication Michel Ritter. Air Power / Peace Power is dedicated to the artistic work of Michel Ritter (1949-2007). As the founding director of the Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg who had established himself as an important figure of contemporary exhibition-making, Ritter shaped the institution until 2002. The publication follows the eponymous exhibition on Ritter’s oeuvre which was presented in 2021 at the Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg and is accompanied by an essay written by Nicolas Brulhart, the former Artistic Director of the Kunsthalle. In his text, Brulhart pays tribute to this remarkable artist who chose to set aside his own practice in order to devote himself as a curator to the service of other artists.

From the 1970s to the 2000s, Ritter developed between Switzerland, Paris and New York a body of work of remarkable coherence, which was influenced notably by a critical sensitivity towards Western worldviews (shaped by formative journeys), as well as by conceptual practices and pictorial media strategies of 1970s art.

The publication gives an overview of Ritter’s collages on paper, films, and site-specific interventions and gathers archival materials, bearing witness to the fleeting, sensitive and critical poetics of an artist who placed the idea of energy at the heart of his practice.