Hans Krüsi
Born in 1920.
Died in 1995.
A cow, a fir tree, a scrap of cardboard: Hans Krüsi transforms familiar motifs and ordinary materials into a personal universe. Born in 1920 and deceased in 1995, this Swiss self-taught artist drew on his Appenzell memories while freely experimenting with images, objects and sounds.
He settled in St Gallen in 1948 and for a long time made his living selling flowers, notably on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse. Around 1975, he began offering his customers small paintings, often close to postcard size. The exhibitions of 1981 marked a decisive step in his recognition and enabled him to devote himself more fully to creating art.
Alpine landscapes, chalets, trees and farm animals make up his repertoire. Vivid colours and divisions within the image give these subjects a particular rhythm. Krüsi drew and painted on salvaged paper, bags and milk packaging.
The support thus retains its concrete presence and contributes to the invention of the work. Stencils, photocopies and collages allowed him to revisit the motifs while transforming them.
His taste for experimentation extended beyond the painted surface. He recorded sounds in nature, assembled objects and devised crank-operated mechanisms that made strips of cows move past. In 1992, he created nine panels for a bicycle carriage of the Appenzeller Bahnen: his landscapes thus entered the everyday lives of travellers.
Represented, among other places, in the collections of Art Brut in Lausanne, Krüsi invites us to look differently at what may seem modest. One can follow the repetition of an animal, observe a variation in colour or discern the trace of a package. These details reveal a body of work founded on repetition and metamorphosis, in which memories of the rural world meet an ever-active material curiosity.
