Hubert Looser Collection

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Hubert Looser Collection is a collection of works of modern and contemporary art compiled by the Swiss entrepreneur Hubert Looser (* 1938) . The focus is on Swiss, European and American artists from the 1950s to 1970s.

Hubert Looser

history

The beginnings

Hubert Looser's interest in art was aroused at a young age. During a language study trip to Paris at the age of 19, Looser addressed an art print in such a way that from then on he regularly visited museums. Extensive trips and visits to ancient cultural sites and museums in India , Indonesia , Japan , Cambodia , Taiwan , Egypt , Mexico and Iran followed .

In the 1960s and 1970s, Looser, who has lived in Switzerland since 1964, began collecting works for himself from mainly regionally important artists, which he became aware of through his regular visits to galleries and museums. Works by artists from Gruppe 33 and others such as Le Corbusier , Jean Tinguely and Meret Oppenheim found their way into the Looser Collection.

The 1990s

From 1985 to 1995 Looser came across well-known Swiss artists such as Louis Soutter and Alberto Giacometti at Art Basel . In 1996 Looser acquired the sculpture “Sylvette” (1954) from Pablo Picasso , which is repeatedly exhibited in museums as one of the artist's key works (including the Guggenheim Museum New York , Museo Picasso Málaga, Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien ). In addition, Looser collected works by European artists such as Georg Baselitz , Gotthard Graubner , Günther Uecker , Otto Piene , Gerhard Merz , Giuseppe Penone , Emilio Vedova , Janis Kounellis, Richard Long , Anthony Caro , Tony Cragg , Bernar Venet and Arman at this time .

From the mid-1990s onwards, Looser's focus shifted to the American art market, particularly to Abstract Expressionist artists . When buying, Looser limited himself exclusively to important works by influential artists who were already role models for younger artists. Works by Willem de Kooning and Ellsworth Kelly laid the foundation for this branch of the collection ; two artists who were hardly represented in European museums at the time. Likewise David Smith , whose works found their way into the collection as well as works by Cy Twombly , Richard Tuttle and the minimalists Donald Judd , Agnes Martin , Tony Smith or Robert Ryman .

At the same time, Looser became aware of the dialogues between artists and works. So it was an exciting discovery for the collector. B. to track down the precipitate of ancient Egyptian art in Alberto Giacometti or Cy Twombly . This led to the next step in the collection. Fascinated by the idea of ​​expanding the USA and Europe as a principle of dialogue, Looser bought a large drawing by Arshile Gorky from 1932. Gorky's works can be traced back to Europe and the reference to Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso is clear. At the same time, Looser created a dialogue between Gorky and Swiss surrealists such as Serge Brignoni , Kurt Seligmann and André Thomkins in the collection .

today

From around 2006 there was great demand for the renowned contemporary art artists on the art market, which caused prices to rise rapidly, but Looser no longer wanted to keep up with them. So he shifted his collection to artists who were less well known and came across Al Taylor in a Zurich gallery and later the French artist Fabienne Verdier.

The Hubert Looser Collection roughly represents Looser's collection period from the 1930s to the present day, with a clear focus on Informel , Surrealism , Abstract Expressionism , Minimal Art and Arte Povera .

The future of the collection

In April 2012, the Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft and the Fondation Hubert Looser, to which Hubert Looser brought his works from 1988 in order to preserve them after his death and make them accessible to the public, reached an agreement that enables the Kunsthaus Zürich to produce 70 works from the collection and exhibited as permanent loans in the Kunsthaus extension, which is being built by star architect David Chipperfield , from 2017. This ensures Looser's wish to keep the groups of works and top works of the collection together and to make them permanently accessible to the public.

For the Kunsthaus Zürich itself, the works in the Hubert Looser Collection represent an extraordinary enrichment. The existing significant group of works by Cy Twombly can be supplemented with six other works - including more recent ones - by the American artist. The abstract expressionist works of Jackson Pollock are accompanied by John Chamberlain and David Smith as distinctive positions. Donald Judd will be present with a representative wall sculpture. Ellsworth Kelly has so far not been represented at the Kunsthaus, nor has Al Taylor. An outstanding new accent is presented to the public with an ensemble of nine works by Willem de Kooning , including the triptych from 1985 and the famous bronze sculpture "Hostess" from 1973. This important abstract artist is represented in the Kunsthaus for the first time with two pictures by Agnes Martin his, as well as prints by Brice Marden ; two pictures by Robert Ryman enter into a dialogue with those in the Kunsthaus collection. The mythical-archaic nature of nature, which has so far mainly been represented in the work of Joseph Beuys and Mario Merz at the Kunsthaus, is gaining in importance thanks to Giuseppe Penone's installations. Lucio Fontana's sculptures round off the ensemble of his Concetti spaziali.

Looser's preference for theses-like juxtapositions of different genres and formats is taken into account by the curators of the Kunsthaus Zürich on several hundred square meters. From 2017, hundreds of thousands of visitors will be able to see the Looser Collection at a prominent location in the heart of Zurich.

collection

The Hubert Looser Collection is one of the most outstanding private collections of modern and contemporary art in Switzerland, with a focus on Abstract Expressionism, Minimal Art and Arte Povera . The beginnings of the collection go back to the 1970s, when Looser dealt with Swiss Surrealism and Informel. The major acquisitions were made with Pablo Picasso's Sylvette sculpture in the early 1990s, as well as masterpieces by Alberto Giacometti , Ellsworth Kelly and Willem de Kooning . The extensive de Kooning holdings are not only the epicenter of the Looser Collection, but also the most extensive in Switzerland. One of the most recent acquisitions is a surrealist paper work by Arshile Gorky , which once again refers to the beginnings of collecting.

The collection, which has grown historically over the past 40 years and today has an international profile, includes works by Serge Brignoni , John Chamberlain , Eduardo Chillida , Lucio Fontana , Alberto Giacometti , Arshile Gorky , Gotthard Graubner , Philip Guston , Roni Horn , Jasper Johns , Ellsworth Kelly , Anselm Kiefer , Yves Klein , Lenz Klotz , Willem de Kooning, Yayoi Kusama, Brice Marden , Agnes Martin , Henri Matisse , Giuseppe Penone , Pablo Picasso, Arnulf Rainer , Mimmo Rotella , Robert Ryman , Marcel Schaffner, Sean Scully , Richard Serra , David Smith, Louis Soutter, Al Taylor, Richard Tuttle , Cy Twombly , Günther Uecker , Emilio Vedova , Fabienne Verdier or Andy Warhol .

The most important themes of the collection are the painterly gesture, the line, the process, the materiality, or the minimalist spiritual as well as the mythical archaic in nature.

Hubert Looser by no means sees the work of art only as a private property, but rather as a cultural asset that requires public exchange. He brought his collection to the Hubert Looser Foundation, founded in 1988 , in order to preserve it and make it accessible to the public even after his death. The first significant step in this direction was the exhibition of masterpieces from the collection in 2012 under the title “My Private Passion. Hubert Looser Collection ”in the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien . Previously, works from the collection had only been loaned to museums or exhibited in Looser's home in Zurich . From 2017, the important collection will move into the extension of the Kunsthaus Zürich as a permanent loan. In 2013, however, it will be shown as a whole for the first time in the large exhibition room.

literature

swell