Matias Spescha
Born in 1925.
Died in 2008.
Matias Spescha (1925–2008) made surface, void and volume the elements of a language of great economy. Born in Trun, in the Grisons, he first trained as a tailor and worked in the village’s cloth factory. Settling in Zurich in 1951, he designed posters before spending time in Paris in the mid-1950s.
From 1958 onwards, Bages in the south of France became one of his places of life and work, in constant connection with Switzerland.
In painting, printmaking and sculpture, Spescha explored the tensions between foreground and background, between a form placed on a surface and the space it opens up around itself. Often, a small number of figures is enough to shift our perception of the picture; in sculpture, these relationships unfold at the scale of the body and the site. This enquiry runs across different media without losing its clarity.
Public commissions, begun as early as 1956, enabled him to test his forms against shared spaces. The Grisons Culture Prize in 1993 and the Fine Arts Prize of the Canton of Zurich in 1999 marked recognition of this artistic journey.
His most ambitious project brought the artist back to Trun. Starting from a small metal form explored in 1996, he conceived OGNA, a concrete sculpture that can be entered. Spescha developed the design with architects, but died before its realisation; the foundation responsible for the project opened it to the public in 2013.
Since 2023, his artistic estate has also been presented in Trun’s former cloth factory. Between the studio, the work one can move through and this return to the place where he learned his trade, his art invites us to experience physically the passage from form to space.
