Born in 1957 in Switzerland, Beat Streuli studied at the Schule fur Gestaltung of Basle and Zurich, as well as the Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin, where he lived between 1981 and 1987. In the late 1980s he started his first series of “street photography” during a residency in Rome, after various projects involving montage, narration, and mise-en-scène. In the 1990s he further developed what have become his signature pieces — first using small formats in black and white, then on larger scale, taken in cities such as Paris, Rome, and New York. These works have been exhibited widely and published in various artist’s books and catalogues. Since 1992 Beat Streuli has used monumental slide projection and, since 1994, video projection. The first billboards and other forms of public installations appeared in the mid-1990s. Transparent prints on glass facades in such contexts remain one of his preferred mediums. From 1996 a new attention to the portrait was noticeable. His work was increasingly globally exhibited, with participation in biennials in Sydney, Johannesburg, and Kwangju; these coincided with solo exhibitions in museums and extended stays in cities such as New York, Sydney, and Tokyo. Until the beginning of the new millennium, Streuli’s work focused on the everyday of the Western metropolis and its inhabitants; his work then became more complex, perhaps as a reflection on globalization and crisis, and demonstrated a growing attention to the presence of non-Western cultures in the social fabric. His participation in the Jordan Festival in Petra, with a monumental fence of images, as well as his publication BXL (for the city of Brussels where he has been living part-time since 2005), in which he confronted the Other as his neighbor, illustrate this development in his work in the 2000s. This decade was also marked by several large-scale exhibitions and commissions, as well as by participation in biennials in Sharjah, Yokohama, and Singapore. Streuli’s current work is shifting to a less documentary and a more pictorial and abstract approach, as was demonstrated by his exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in 2011. (from: Salome Schnetz (ed.), Beat Streuli Public Works 1996 - 2011, JRP / Ringier, Letzigraben, 2012.)