Adolf Weber
Born in 1925.
Died in 1996.
Adolf Weber (1925–1996) grew up in Menziken, in an Aargau farming family. He was drawn to drawing and painting from his school days onwards. He trained with Eugen Maurer in Beinwil am See, continued his studies in Zurich with Ernst and Max Gubler and Heinrich Müller, and then attended the École des beaux-arts de Genève.
A painting trip to the Netherlands in 1948 opened the way to a series of journeys through Italy, France, Portugal and Scandinavia. Yet the centre of gravity of his work remained very close to home: landscapes, gardens, interiors and the people around him.
Weber worked as a painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He produced portrait and figure studies alongside an extensive body of landscapes; etching and colour woodcut expanded his means of expression. In his images, the familiar motif becomes an opportunity to observe the light and rhythms of nature.
His attention to the seasons and to the changes in a garden or a lake also points back to the artist’s rural childhood. His Journal du peintre, shown in Wettingen in 1982, follows the transformations of a single year.
The municipal collection of Wettingen has made Weber one of its artists of reference. It holds, among other works, Femme au bureau (1958), oil on canvas, and in 2010 presented late paintings together with assemblages made from found wood and glass. A posthumous retrospective at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau in 1998 traced this artistic trajectory.
Between familiar places and horizons travelled, Weber created a body of work in which everyday experience continually provides new subjects to behold.
