Paul Stöckli
Born in 1906.
Died in 1991.
Paul Stöckli (1906–1991), a painter, draughtsman and printmaker from Stans, was initially trained as a decorative painter in the family business and at the Lucerne School of Arts and Crafts. He continued his training in Basel and then in Munich. Regular stays in Paris from 1931 to 1934 brought him into contact with non-representational painting and Surrealism.
His first independent works included drawings and etchings; he subsequently painted dark landscapes, carnival and Passion scenes, portraits and still lifes. Having resettled in Basel in 1937, he developed an expressive visual language associated with Basel’s “grey painters”. In 1948, he founded the Kreis 48 group with Max Kämpf and Peter Moilliet.
Public-art and sacred-art commissions in the 1950s accompanied his development towards abstraction. From the 1960s onwards, he worked with abstract painting and collage, and from 1978 produced diary pages composed through successive additions, poised between writing and image. The Nidwalden Museum preserves and presents sheets from this diary in its permanent exhibition.
