Marc-Antoine Fehr
Born in 1953.
Born in Zurich in 1953, Marc-Antoine Fehr is a Swiss painter who lives and works between Zurich and Burgundy. The son of a family of artists—his mother, Marie-Hélène Fehr-Clément, is a painter—he grew up in close contact with her work. After a classical education at secondary school, he chose to settle in southern Burgundy and taught himself to paint.
In 1976, he spent seven months at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. He presented his drawings in Zurich in 1978, then devoted himself to painting. In 1985, the Kunstmuseum Winterthur invited him to exhibit, marking an important stage in his public recognition.
Fehr works on drawing and painting in parallel. His large compositions in oil or gouache are preceded by studies, sketches and small paintings. He also develops long-term bodies of work: Le Journal de Pressy takes the form of a book comprising 365 gouaches; Le Pays sans fin, begun in 1999, and The Walk of the Blind Man are painted series conceived as open-ended projects.
His work explores traditional genres—portraiture, landscape, still life and interior—often in monumental formats and narrative cycles. The subjects frequently derive from his immediate surroundings: the house, studio, those close to him, objects and photographs. The scenes remain familiar while opening onto silent, enigmatic atmospheres, poised between observation and staging.
The works documented by public institutions offer an insight into this diversity. The Musée d’art et d’histoire de Neuchâtel included in the Ditesheim donation War Time (2008), oil on canvas, 120 × 250 cm, and Autoportrait à Ceigne Cerdon (2008), oil on canvas, 130 × 160 cm. At the Château de Gruyères, the exhibition Les nuits bourguignonnes presented portraits, still lifes, interior scenes, landscapes and monumental compositions, including La Nuit, Ruth and L’Atelier (2019).
These records underscore the continuity between his living environment and the worlds constructed on the canvas.
