How does a furniture designer become one of the principale representatives of Zurich Concrete Art ? In 1917, Camille Graeser opened an office in Stuttgart with three sections : architecture, advertising graphics and design. For several years, he worked with the Deutscher Werkbund Group, creating furniture and interior design. On leaving Germany for Zurich, in 1933, he turned to painting, drawing, sculpture and relief. His previous research work in creating furniture gradually evolved into investigations about painting.
The exhibition, therefore, retraces the steps of his transition to painting which led him to “become a Concrete artist”. Camille Graeser started by studying the theory of colours and composition before developing his own formal language within the Allianz group, which he joined in 1937. The Allianz group is an association of Swiss modern artists who started developing theories about Concrete Art. They distinguished Concrete Art from Abstract Art by declaring, “nothing is more concrete or real than a line, a colour or a surface.” Little by little, Graeser’s painting moved away from observable reality and relied more on mathematical calculations which included geometrical figures. By 1950, he was counted among the circle of the Zurich Concrete artists, alongside Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse and Verena Loewensberg.

Camille Graeser was born in 1892 in Carouge (GE) and died in Wald (ZH) in 1980.

The exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of the Fondation Nestlé pour l’Art, the Bureau de contrôle des métaux précieux, and of a generous anonymous donor.