Aargauer Kunsthaus shows masterpieces by Johannes Robert Schürch
Published: Thursday, Sep 12th 2024, 14:20
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The Aargauer Kunsthaus is showing works by a Swiss artist who is little known to the public: Johannes Robert Schürch (1895-1941) was an important representative of early modernism in Swiss art, dealing with the existential themes of human existence.
Around 50 years after the retrospective at the Aargauer Kunsthaus, the exhibition entitled "Alles sehen" ("Seeing Everything") is once again focusing on this touching work. The Kunsthaus purchased works by the Aarau-born artist Schürch early on, which are now a focal point of its own graphic art collection.
Schürch created masterpieces of early modernism. According to the Kunsthaus, many of the 130 works on paper shown in the exhibition have been hidden away in collections for decades. The works will be shown to the public for the first time together with previously unpublished sketchbooks.
The solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus is dedicated to his drawings from the 1920s and early 1930s. It provides an insight into Schürch's most productive creative period. The colorful, restrained ink drawings and expressive watercolors are among the highlights of his oeuvre, as the Kunsthaus writes.
Obsessive work
Schürch created them almost obsessively between 1922 and 1932. At that time, he lived far from society and in poverty with his mother in a remote forest house in Ticino.
There he detached himself from the works of his role models such as Ferdinand Hodler, Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne. In his works, he combined events and experiences with his inner images, fears and visions, explain the exhibition organizers.
Grief, longing and love
The themes include death and mourning, oppression and the longing for belonging and love. The settings for the works are urban peripheries, dreamscapes, inns and brothels.
When the largely self-taught Schürch died in Ascona TI in 1941 at the age of 46, he left behind an extensive and stylistically broad oeuvre of more than 7,000 works. In addition to oil paintings, pastels and gouaches, it includes an almost unmanageable number of small-format pen and ink brush drawings and watercolors.
The radicalism and intensity with which he has translated the vulnerability of human existence into drawings has a resonance in the present, writes the Kunsthaus.
Aargauer Kunsthaus, Johannes Robert Schürch: "Alles Sehen", from September 14, 2024 to January 12, 2025; there is a publication accompanying the exhibition.
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