Markus Raetz at Kunstmuseum Basel

Raetz is one of the most important Swiss artists of his generation. He was born in Buren, a small town near Bern, Switzerland, in 1941. He grew up there, worked as an assistant to a local artist during school vacations, took teacher training in Bern, and worked as a teacher from the ages of twenty to twenty-two. He has had no formal art training, except "half a year studying etching in Amsterdam." However, he knew, he says, from the age of ten that he would be an artist. "My father liked to draw. He saw that maybe I would do something he had wanted to do."
Raetz still lives in Bern. Since he began showing his work in 1966, he has had exhibitions in many galleries and museums, including all the major Swiss museums and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Kolnischer Kunstverein in Germany, the Serpentine Gallery in London, the New Museum in New York City and, in 2001, the Arts Club of Chicago.
In 1988 he represented Switzerland in the Venice Biennale. His Venice exhibition was partly made up of seascapes, but Raetz did not go out with his easel to paint them. He calls them "invented," and the essayist for the Venice catalog speaks of "fields of vision" and "continuity in constant flux."
Flux is especially evident in a work of sculpture that is simply a piece of sheet metal cut into binocular "eyes" and hammered to produce a horizon line and other marks that reflect light differently from one point of view to the next.
The fact
that this drawing retrospective is taking place in Basel is due to the special
relationship between Raetz and the Kunstmuseum. In 1968, under the direction of
Dieter Koepplin, the Kupferstichkabinett began to acquire an extensive
collection of drawings and prints by the artist.
The exhibit
also contains some models of sculptures and installations, as well as a few
actual sculptures, which show the extent to which Raetz' explorations of
perception in drawing also take place in three-dimensional space.
Markus
Raetz, Drawings
Kunstmuseum basel
20.10.2012 - 17.02.2013
Kunstmuseum basel
20.10.2012 - 17.02.2013
Curator:
Anita Haldemann
(Sources: www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch; www.crownpoint.com; www.visualnews.com)