Hans Krüsi (painter)

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Hans Krüsi (born April 15, 1920 in Zurich ; † September 9, 1995 in St. Gallen ) was a Swiss painter and a well-known Zurich original . He is considered an important representative of the brut species .

Life

Krüsi was an illegitimate child of Emma Krüsi and grew up first with foster parents in Speicher , then in the orphanage of the municipality in Appenzellerland . With a poor school education and several years of work as a farmhand and gardener's assistant in various parts of Switzerland, he moved to St. Gallen in 1947 and set up on his own at the end of 1948. Early in the morning he drove from St. Gallen to Zurich's Bahnhofstrasse and sold flowers that he had either picked himself in the Alps or bought from wholesalers. The precarious living conditions and his rather weak constitution led him to a six-month recovery cure on the Walenstadtberg in autumn 1968 .

He started taking photographs at the age of 16, and in 1975 he also began to paint. He mainly painted on wrapping paper , cardboard or napkins , the documents available to him free of charge anywhere. His preferred motifs - all taken from his immediate environment - were animals, especially cows. Since the mid-1970s, Krüsi has also been selling his own drawings and paintings at his Zurich flower stand. He was so successful in this that he soon made more money with his pictures than with his flowers. When he died of emphysema in September 1995 , he had become a wealthy man.

At the beginning of 1981 the Buchmann Gallery in St. Gallen exhibited his pictures for the first time, then, in the same year, the Anton Meier Gallery in Geneva. This attracted the attention of the Swiss press and the art scene to the strange outsider and original self-taught artist. As a result, Krüsi was soon able to give up his flower stand and devote himself entirely to artistic work. In 1991 the only work monograph to date was published with two essays on life and work as well as 91 colored plates.

Krüsi's previously unseen estate includes around 4,000 pictures and drawings, a large number of photographs, negatives, Polaroids and overpainted photographs, as well as tape recordings and sound collages, as well as a series of prose texts and poems along with an immense number of other raw materials. The Art Museum Thurgau , Kartause Ittingen, where his estate is administered, organized from April 8th to October 7th 2001 under the title Krüsi, Hans: Even a nothing can become something ... a first overview of his works.

On September 19, 2009, one of the three radio plays compiled by Michael Stauffer from the estate of Hans Krüsi with the title I can't be without a donkey was broadcast on Deutschlandfunk .

literature

  • Peter Killer, Peter E. Schaufelberger: Hans Krüsi . Säntis, Urnäsch 1991 (2nd edition 1995), ISBN 3-907993-01-2
  • Markus Landert, Dorothee Messmer (ed.): Even nothing can become something . Niggli, Sulgen 2001, ISBN 3-7212-0414-X (= catalog for the exhibition in the Ittingen Charterhouse )
  • Michael Stauffer: Stauffer reply to Krüsi . 3 radio plays (3 audio CDs). The healthy shipping of people, Lucerne 2008, ISBN 978-3-905825-05-3

Web links

Commons : Hans Krüsi  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ radio play; Stauffer to Krüsi answer deutschlandfunk.de September 19, 2009
personal data
SURNAME Krüsi, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss painter and city original
DATE OF BIRTH April 15, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich
DATE OF DEATH September 9, 1995
Place of death St. Gallen