Stephan Spicher

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Stephan Spicher (* 1950 in Basel ) is a Swiss painter with international relationships and fields of work in Switzerland, Russia, Indonesia and Japan. His studios are in Oberwil near Basel and in Maggia, in Ticino. The central theme of the artist is the elementary question of seeing and perception and their artistic implementation in painting and drawing. His entire oeuvre is therefore determined by continuity in change and characterized by the fundamental meaning of the "concept of life" with which the artist asks about the forces or energies that stand behind all life and thus also behind the images, set them in motion and permanently transform them .

life and work

After finishing school, Stephan Spicher, looking for his own suitable means of expression, decides to study art at the Kunstgewerbeschule, today's University of Design and Art (HGK) . He then completed his training with the Italian painter Beppe Assenz. In 1980 Spicher moved to Maggia in southern Switzerland, where he spent part of his childhood and discovered his love for the stony world and tectonics of the valley of the same name, which was scientifically researched by his father, a professional geologist. The artist's first continuous creative period up to 1983 was clearly influenced by his stay in Ticino and several study trips to Italy. At this time he was still completely under the spell of color and discovered the spiritual and dynamic expressiveness of sacred two-dimensional painting of the Italian Middle Ages and thus an artistic attitude that particularly fascinated and influenced him in comparison with that of the Renaissance .

Ash walls

Stephan Spicher spends the winter of 1982/83 in cold , urban Berlin , which encourages him to reduce the variety of colors and to take pictures in black and white.

His preoccupation with the earth and with rocks led him back to southern Switzerland, where he found a painterly condensation of material through the use of natural pigments, ashes and plaster. Until 1986 "ash walls" were created. In 1986 and 1987 in Mendrisiotto, on the border with Italy, the first energetic "ash walls" in the rust-colored red of the Menning were built , with which Spicher traveled to Japan , together with a selection of younger Swiss artists and on behalf of the Swiss cultural foundation Pro Helvetia . The exhibition “Constellations, Aspects of Contemporary Swiss Art” continues to Taiwan and the USA and can then also be seen in the Kunsthalle Basel . Spicher's multi-part ash wall impresses with its concentrated energy and its multi-layered density, which contains signs of fire, ashes and traces of charred beams and branches in color and in the compacted material.

Dualisms

In 1988 and 1989 the drawing components begin to take on a life of their own.

In 1989, Stephan Spicher temporarily withdrew from southern Switzerland, where he has now become a permanent part of the Ticino artist group of his generation, and opened a large, bright studio in Oberwil (Basel-Land) in which he still works today. Here, under the influence of traditional Japanese imagery, he begins to work on divided, mutually displaceable and interchangeable pictorial grounds that enable him to more clearly grasp the dialectical positions and tension between heavy and light, solid and fluid, and stability and movement.

Space and counter space

After several exhibitions in Basel, Zug and Tenero (Ticino) and after a longer study trip to Bali (1992), the artist made several trips to Venezuela and the Caribbean in 1993 and 1994 . His encounter with the two steeply rising volcanic cones of the Montañhas Pitons near Santa Lucia becomes the starting point for new artistic questions and works, which from now on revolve around the theme of “space and counter space”.

As a result, Spicher creates a large number of works in which the Pitons are the focus and in which he uses painterly means to overturn the opposite space in such a way that it is transformed into a spiritual surface with a strong presence.

The further development towards a free and independent line manifested itself in 1996 and 1997 initially in a scanning between line and surface: three-part works with radial bundles of rays on zinc and with canvases, on which the drawing paves new paths, are created. With his choice of zinc plates, which remain artistically unworked as a background, Spicher tries to reduce painting without having to forego the colors of the industrial material. Finally, he replaces the painted color with a chemical reaction painted with a brush: The color on the zinc sheet is the result of etching and then painting over with silver nitrate .

Eternal Line

From 2001 onwards, Stephan Spicher's work gradually traced back to the painterly, with which he created a counterweight to the ever greater reduction of the "Eternal Line" as an increasingly abstract building. He begins by treating the surface in a painterly way, detached from the line, and brings it up to the lines drawn in advance with adhesive tape. Between 2001 and 2003 the painter worked with invisible lines drawn with water, which intersect with visible lines drawn and painted with ink and create a mysteriously vibrating, picturesque flow at the intersection.

In 1986 he traveled to Japan and in 1992 to Bali , whose culture and spirituality he was to get to know better in later years through his collaboration and friendship with Made Wianta, a leading Indonesian artist of his generation, and with the Bali specialist Urs Ramseyer from Basel. In Bali, the artist is so deeply concerned with observing nature that his “Eternal Line” is transformed in a miraculous metamorphosis into bamboo stalks, from whose internodes side shoots and finally flowers grow.

Blossom

With his turn to the vegetable and the painterly commitment to the surface, Spicher paints with car paint on light and reflective aluminum. With gold leaf he applies botanically indefinable, archetypal flower shapes and thus intensifies his play with gloss and non-gloss, with transparency and non-transparency.

In 2006, in a large solo exhibition in the Ludwig Museum in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and in a joint exhibition with Kumari Nahappan in the National Library in Singapore, large formats with gold blossoms on a surface painted with lacquer can be seen. Finally, the artist also begins to mill monochrome flower and leaf shapes out of aluminum plates, which he mounts as picture compositions on house or gallery walls. The largest and most impressive of these works are created on site at the Rivellino di Leonardo da Vinci (Locarno 2010) and in the Indonesian gallery Sangkring Art Space (Yogyakarta 2013).

In the meantime, Stephan Spicher, with a view to two solo exhibitions in Kyoto (Hashimoto Museum 2014) and in St. Petersburg (Russian State Museum 2015), has returned to pure, silent painting and pictures in which a mature basic painting culture and decades of artistic and human Experience sets the tone.

Exhibitions (selection)

Solo exhibitions: (selection)

  • 1986: Art Basel 17/86 solo show Galerie Brambach
  • 1990: Kunsthaus Grenchen
  • 1998: Galerie Riehentor, Basel
  • 2002: Dmitriy Semenov Gallery, St. Petersburg , Russia
  • 2003: Museo Villa dei Cedri, Bellinzona
  • 2007: The Ludwig Museum in the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg , Russia
  • 2009: Fundacio Niebla, Casavellas-Girona, Spain
  • 2010: Il rivellino di Leonardo da Vinci, Locarno
  • 2012: RuArts Gallery, Moscow
  • 2013: Sangkring Art Space, Yogyakarta , Indonesia
  • 2014: Hashimoto Museum, Kyoto , Japan
  • 2016: Inner Voice Gallery, St. Petersburg, Russia
  • 2017: G77-Gallery, Kyoto, Japan
  • 2019: Noivoi Gallery, Nagoya, Japan
  • 2019: Museo Casa Rusca, Locarno, Switzerland

Group exhibitions (selection)

  • 2006: Mountains - Galerie Beyeler, Basel
  • 2006: Seeds and Blossoms - with K. Nahappan, National Library, Singapore
  • 2008: Pinacoteca Comunale Casa Rusca, Locarno
  • 2009: Art & Natura - Museo Villa dei Cedri, Bellinzona
  • 2010: Meeting with japan art - Karin Sutter Galerie, Basel + Dmitriy Semenov Gallery, St. Petersburg
  • 2010: Sky - The National Russian Museum, St.Petersburg
  • 2011: Japan Art +2 Museum Yokohoma, Japan
  • 2015: Kunsthalle Palazzo, Liestal Switzerland
  • 2015: Museo Villa dei Cedri, Bellinzona, Switzerland
  • 2017: Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan
  • 2017: Kunsthaus Aarau, Switzerland
  • 2018: Galerie Sacchetti, Ascona, Switzerland

Publications (selection, in chronological order)

  • 1992: Stephan Spicher opere 1982 - 1992 Galleria Matascci- Tenero ISBN 88-85118-18-6 .
  • 1999: Stephan Spicher drawings, Galerie Riehentor Basel
  • 2003: Stephan Spicher Eternal Line Museo villa dei Cedri Bellinzona
  • 2005: Stephan Spicher - Eternal Line (3 vol.) Matamera Books Indonesia ISBN 979-95681-8-8 .
  • 2006: Stephan Spicher Blossom - The Ludwig Museum in the Russian Museum St. Petersburg ISBN 3-938051-69-8 .
  • 2016: Stephan Spicher Permeating the skies ISBN 978-5-906550-63-7
  • 2016 Hashimoto Garden Museum Kyoto
  • 2019 Pinacoteca Casa Rusca Locarno

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Meinhardt, Johannes, "Stephan Spicher, Stratograph and Geologist", in: Hartl & Klier, Tübingen, 1989 Schwarz, Johanna, M., "Mitologie della Terra (Earth mythologies)", in: Tedeschi, Schwarz and Guarda, 1992, 15 -24
  2. ↑ Schwarz, Johanna, M., "Terra vivente (Living Earth)", in: Tedeschi et al., 1992, 40-48
  3. ↑ Pfeifer, Tadeus, "Die Erdarbeiter, die Luftgeister", in: Garzaniga & Ueker, 1990
  4. ↑ Pfeifer, Tadeus, "Painting of Borders", in: Carzaniga & Ueker, 1994
  5. ↑ Ramseyer, Urs, Crossing Lines, Made Wianta / Stephan Spicher, Museum der Kulturen Basel, 2001, 3-9 Ramseyer, Urs, “The Line as Awareness and Path”, in: Eternal Line, Bali, 2005, 66-68
  6. ↑ Stegmann, Markus: "Stephan Spicher - Galvanische Gewässer" ("Galvanic Waters"), in: Stephan Spicher, Eternal Line, Basel, 2001, 6-10
  7. ↑ Will, Maria, “Il gesto, il volo”, in: Museo Villa dei Cedri, Bellinzona, 2003
  8. ↑ Borovsky, Alexander, Stephan Spicher, in: Stephan Spicher, Blossom, St. Petersburg, 2007, 5-9
  9. ↑ Ramseyer, Urs, cf. the exhibition texts on Singapore, 2006, Karin Sutter, 2006 and Yogyakarte 2013
personal data
SURNAME Spicher, Stephan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss artist
DATE OF BIRTH 1950
PLACE OF BIRTH Basel