Archivio Conz

Arthur Aeschbacher (1923 Geneva, Switzerland – 2020 Paris, France) was a Swiss painter known for his distinctively thick collages and graphically fragmented paintings. While he is often associated with the Nouveaux Réalistes, he remained ideologically distant from them. He favored posters and other printed matter as the primary materials for his work. Collage was his “painterly” means of developing a new visual language centering on color, viscosity, and edges through peeling, tearing, pasting, and reassembling torn pieces of posters. In the 1970s, he returned to painting while still employing elements from the collage techniques he had developed. For example, he painted letters fragmented across the canvas on a dark ground in black, grey, or blue before overlaying it with a color grid. Late in his oeuvre, he utilized both the abundance of his earlier collages and the reductive quality of his paintings. The typographic element has always remained key throughout Aeschbacher’s oeuvre, alternately playing between the flat graphical poster and the figurative gestural force in painting, where color unifies and expounds. Aeschbacher’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Louvre (1964) and the Centre Pompidou (1985) in Paris, and Centre d’Art Contemporain de Corbeil, as well as in museums in Belgium, Switzerland, and Japan.