Jean-Frédéric Schnyder
The richly faceted work of Jean-Frédéric Schnyder (b. 1945), one of Switzerland’s foremost contemporary artists, is a source of endless discovery. His international recognition as a painter came, at the very latest, with his Wanderung series of small-format paintings of autobahn views from St. Margarethen to Geneva, first shown at the 1993 Venice Biennale. What is less well known, however, is the fact that he began working as an artist in the late 1960s and that his early works include idiosyncratic, fantastical objects made of wire, lego, bamboo, pewter and ceramics, redolent of imaginary folk cultures. This exhibition is a journey through time, charting a course from the objects and paintings of Schnyder’s early years to his latest work, and linking them in a cosmos that is as bafflingly ambiguous as it is compelling.
