Manon (artist)

Manon (born 1940) was born Rosmarie Küng in Bern, Switzerland. She produces installations, performances and photography. She first came to prominence in the 1974 with the installation "The Salmon coloured boudoir". Her environments and photographic scenes are distillations of social change in the 1970s, sexual liberation, and the search for new roles. In photographic series such as "Woman with shaved head" and "Ball of lonelinesses" she addresses among other things the social construction of identity.
She has been awarded several prizes, including the 2008 Meret Oppenheim Prize.
Biography.
In 1972 she opened her boutique, "Manon’s", in the old part of Zurich where she sold her own creations: jackets made from glitter fabric with appliqués. She posed in self designed interiors as a model for fashion magazines. In 1973 and 1974 Manon experimented for the first time in photography, creating Polaroids, and 'Fetischbilder' (Fetish Pictures). She was submerged in Zurich’s subculture during this time, meeting the artists Sigmar Polke, Jürgen Klauke, Luciano Castelli, Markus Räetz, Walter Pfeiffer, and Esther Altdorfer, filmmaker Daniel Schmid, and musician Stefan Wittwer. 
Her 1974 meticulously furnished bedroom in a loft on Augustinergasse in Zurich presents a little universe filled with fetish objects, feathers, and glittery materials, and would become the starting point for her first installation 'Das lachsfarbene Boudoir' (The salmon coloured boudoir) at the art gallery Li Tobler. It was reconstructed in 2006 and thereafter shown at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, at the Helmhaus in 2008 and the Swiss Institute for Contemporary Art in New York City in 2009.
A monograph on her work and career was published in 2008. Titled "Manon, A Person: A Swiss Pioneer of Body and Performance Art", the book covers the range of her work from the 1970's onward.