Markus Raetz

We are delighted to announce an exhibition by Markus Raetz, the great Swiss artist who passed away in 2020. We will present a selection of sculptures and drawings from different years.

Raetz speaks to the mind and the heart with poetic and cunning, yet essential images. His research developed around the mechanisms of perception and the plurality of vision. He outlined the foundations of his approach in notebooks in the 1960s and 1970s: lines form figures, landscapes and objects whose continuous transformation draws us into the creative process, conscious of the fluidity of images and viewpoints.

Over the years the ideas and themes developed in the drawings were transformed into works, became installations, sculptures, monumental projects. Often made with natural, unconventional or ephemeral materials, they conserve the lightness of the drawing and the awareness of being images, and thus representation, play, thought. Examples include the eucalyptus leaves that form faces on walls (1982); the branches that when seen from a given vantage point shape the torso of Eva (1983, Kunsthaus Zürich); the granite steles scattered on a meadow, which seen from a nearby hill look like a face (1984, Merian Park, Basel).

Since the early 1990s Raetz has worked on a cycle of sculptures, often cast in bronze, that include a metamorphosis: works that take on a different appearance depending on the point of view. The movement of the viewer around the work makes it possible to find the position from which an apparently formless mass suddenly becomes the representation of a familiar object like a head, a pipe, the silhouette of Mickey Mouse. In other works the sculpture itself is mobile, and continuously transforms itself before our eyes. Shapes change their appearance and their meaning: a word can be shifted into its exact opposite, a glass can become a bottle. In Raetz’s works opposites coexist and nothing is as it appears at first glance. The complexity of the reality that surrounds us is revealed through a simultaneously playful and conceptual analysis of images, bodies, and words.

From 1966 to the present Markus Raetz has exhibited in several galleries and museums, including Kunsthaus Zürich (1975), Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1979), the New Museum in New York (1988), the Serpentine Gallery in London (1993), the Museum der Moderne of Salzburg (2006), and more recently at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and MAMCO Geneva in 2011. In 2012-2013 Kunstmuseum Basel presented a major retrospective of his drawings, and in 2016 the MASI of Lugano presented a solo exhibition of over 150 of his works. Currently Kunstmuseum Bern is devoting a retrospective lasting until February 2024.The artist has represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1988, and has taken part in Documenta, Kassel in 1968, 1972 and 1982.

Works by Markus Raetz are in the collections of MoMA New York, Tate Gallery in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art of Frankfurt, and the major Swiss museums.