Hugo Wetli
Born in 1916.
Died in 1972.
His work moves between two practices that he never set against one another: commissioned graphic design and painting. Initially trained in architectural drafting and subsequently in graphic arts, he worked in Bern and Geneva, spent 1947–1948 in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and from 1949 to 1956 worked for a men’s fashion company in Olten. He then opened his own studio.
Posters, illustrations for travel books and commissions for Swissair accompanied his painterly practice; from 1967 onwards, he was a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale. A mural decoration for the Swiss National Exhibition in Lausanne in 1964 further expanded the scale of his work.
Cities, landscapes and figures run through his paintings, drawings and lithographs. From the façades of Broadway to the Emmental, from Greece to the Swiss Alps, his subjects bear witness both to a travelling curiosity and to an attachment to the Bernese region. The swift, assured line animates the contours; contrasts of colour lend the scenes an expressive energy.
In some compositions, the forms are brought towards the foreground: depth recedes in favour of the surface and the balance of the elements. The poster artist’s mastery thus nourishes the painter’s vision without reducing the image to a message.
The Mobiliar Art Collection holds, among other works, Beizli in Griechenland (1962), Afrikanischer Garten, views of the Emmental and Fassaden am Brodway (1961). Their juxtaposition makes perceptible the variety of an artist for whom observing a place becomes a visual construction. Wetli transforms both the stages of his travels and familiar landscapes into dense images, where the momentum of the gesture meets a rigorous composition.
