The Pierre Gianadda Foundation Martigny, which already held a Hans Erni exhibition in 1989, is now - on the 90th anniversary of the artist's birth - putting on its first really complete retrospective of his work. This exhibition gives an overview of the seventy years or so of Hans Erni's artistic activities.
The exhibition opens with the artist's first works - paintings, frescoes and plastic art forms. Some of the works date from the early thirties. They were inspired by Picasso and Cubism and they bear his pseudonym "François Grèques. Then comes a series of extremely significant and rarely-exhibited abstract works that show how his works developed during the thirties. In 1933-34, Hans Erni was in Paris where he formed part of the "Abstraction-Creation" Group. In 1936, he painted an abstract fresco for the Swiss section of the Milan Triennial.
He then worked in London where he met artists such as Alexander Calder, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. The gigantic mural entitled Die Schweiz, das Ferienland der Völker (Switzerland, Holiday Land of the People) which was commissioned in 1939 for the Zurich National Exhibition, marked Hans Erni's return to figurative painting.
Until then, he had been recognized only by a select circle of avant-garde connoisseurs but now he was starting to make a name for himself with the general public. Studies and certain sections of this fresco - which is 100 metres long and is now the property of the Swiss National Museum in Zurich - will be on exhibition at the Foundation. During the forties and fifties he turned out a mass of more or less well-known works.
One of the latter was a painting done in 1953 and entitled Tribute to Picasso which shows Picasso, Aragon and Eluard - the French artists Erni had frequented in Paris where he had a new studio - and the Night of Fear, a terribly accusing painting done in 1957 as a reaction to the invasion of Hungary by the Red Army.
More recent works are also on exhibition. This retrospective also includes a number of self-portraits and, in the new Bellvedere Room, there are drawings, various works on paper and notebooks of sketches done on ethnographic expeditions. A selection of ceramics, bibliophilic works and posters (on show outside the entrance to the exhibition) throw a new light on the exceptionally rich and diverse work of Hans Erni.
The exhibition is rounded out by an historical and documentary section which, inter alia, refers to a recently revealed side of Swiss history. During the Cold War, Hans Erni was placed under surveillance as a supposed member of the Communist Party and he was refused a number of public commissions
The exhibition, designed by Andres Furger, the Curator of the Swiss National Museum, and Marco Obrist, an art historian, includes a richly illustrated, bi-lingual catalogue jointly written by several authors.
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