MUSEUM RITTER - Web Tour Camille Graeser

This exhibition, arranged chronologically in constellations of work, traces the process by which Camille Graeser’s arrived at his images. Around 200 choice studies and drafts from his period in Zurich
(1938–1978) have been brought together with paintings and reliefs to create a dialogue. In this way fascinating insights are granted into the way he worked: from his first, fleetingly sketched ideas to the finished painting or relief.

Early Reliefs / Early Rotations / Progressions

The first room of the exhibition concentrates on the artist’s early concrete, constructivist work. The beginning is marked by the relief “Konstruktion I” (1938), together with a selection of accompanying sketches and drafts. Here Graeser has combined a geometrical vocabulary with an amorphous curved shape. But soon irregular and rounded elements were to disappear completely from his work.
In 1943 he devised the “Early Rotations”. A painting from this group, “Abgewandelte Quadrate”
(Modified Squares, 1943), has been juxtaposed in the exhibition with the autonomous drawing “Astrale Konstruktion” (Astral Construction) of the same year. Both works are in the keeping of the Marli Hoppe-Ritter Collection. Beginning in 1944, an orthogonal pictorial element entered Graeser’s painting. The most important module in his compositions up till the mid-50s was the
T-element, which he liked to combine with the principle of progression.

Loxodromic Compositions / Rhythmic Angle Reductions and Additions

From 1946 to 1951 Graeser worked on a larger group of works which he subsumed under the terms “Skewed Relations“ or “Loxodromic (= obliquely angled) Compositions”. These refer to the bar elements that are set at diagonals and link up squares or rectangles. Many of these compositions awaken associations with music, not least in titles such as “Sinfonie der Farbe” (Symphony of Colours, 1946). This musical analogy was fully intended: “Concrete Art should be equated with music, because it creates symphonic sounds for the eyes, especially for eyes that can also hear”, as Graeser wrote in 1951. The sketches and drafts for the gaily coloured paintings in this group include constellations of forms and colours that set out from the pattern of graph paper and permute this theme through any number of variations. A rhythmic and systematic approach likewise characterises the group of works that make up Graeser’s “Rhythmic Angle Reductions and Rhythmic Additions.”

Form Accumulations / Eccentric Rotations

The group of so-called “Form Accumulations” largely consists of progressions of squares and rectangles done in complementary colours and distributed about a central horizontal line, with each element having an equivalent on the either side that corresponds both in spatial extension and the “weight” of the colour (e.g. “Energien in der Achse” = Energies at the Axis, 1957/68). In the “Eccentric Rotations”, the composition generally develops from inside to the outside. Set around a visual focus located outside of the picture’s centre, we find a rhythmic sequence of coloured square or rectangular shapes that often suggest a swivelling motion.

Relations

Camille Graeser’s striped paintings (“Relations”) form a group of over 100 works. Initially from 1958/59 to 1964 he created his vertical format “Early Relations”; then later he also produced square striped paintings (such as “Horizontal Elements in Vertical Relation”, 1964). With their radical simplicity, these paintings anticipate the ideas of Minimal Art. From the mid-1960s onward the artist began to “upset” the harmony of these paintings by vertically dividing individual coloured stripes to produce squares, as in the small painting “Kühle Relation” (Cool Relation, 1966). In the early 1970s Graeser returned to the motif of the vertical, slender “Relations” in the bar reliefs that marked his late period.

Dislocations / Permutations

In the mid-1960s Graeser began to develop away from the “Relations” to create what he termed “Dislocations”. For this he released the square from the row or the stripe and shifted or “dislocated” it to a different position within the painting. In this way individual elements of the painting seem to be set in motion: here a dislocated square is resting on one edge, there it sinks down to the lower margin of the painting. In his later Dislocations, which he did towards the end of the 1970s and which as a rule were restricted to two colour values, a small square ultimately breaks out of a vertical strip of colour and seems to have been caught in the moment of falling (e. g. “Caput Mortuum 1:7”, 1978). With his “Dislocations” Graeser developed a unique type of painting within the realm of Concrete Art. The accompanying sketches reveal possible variations on the process of dislocation, along with numerous colour variations.
Thematically linked to these are the “Permutations”. Thus for instance the compositional scheme of the painting “Permutation” (1969) consists of two configurations of colours and surfaces which have exchanged parts so as to enter into a dialogue with one another.