The permanents exhibitions

A (RE)VISION OF THE WORK OF PETER STÄMPFLI
From Objects to Abstraction

Some of Peter Stämpfli’s paintings are accustomed to making spectacular entrances wherever they go. Such was the case in 1970 with Polyester Cord, a six-metre-long work that crossed the Venice lagoon by boat to the Biennale Gardens, to the amazement of those who watched it being carried into the building designed by architect Bruno Giacometti for the Swiss Pavilion.

Polyester Cord or Cavallino, which can boast as much of their width as of their height, are two of the icons of the Fundació Stämpfli, accompanied by the rest of the thirty-one works that summarise the evolution of his artistic career.

Room A
In Room A are exhibited works from the 1960s, when Stämpfli used street images to develop a personal dictionary of “objects and gestures of everyday life.”

• Gestures: walking in a raincoat, reading a morning newspaper, or bringing a cup of coffee to one’s lips.
• Objects: vegetables for making broth, a car steering wheel, a tomato, a front wheel with a mudguard.
• Images: large formats, simple and photographic compositions, vivid colours frozen in emptiness, trivial signs taken out of context, oil painting.

Before leaving the room, a work on the back wall — Wildcat nº 2, the one with the wheel and mudguard turning slightly toward us — warns us that this is not a painting like the others, that from it everything began to change.

Room B
And what a change! By the time we go down to Room B, we realise we are entering another world. The object and colour have disappeared; only blacks and greys remain in the kingdom of the tyre. Only the tyre and its geometry — symbol and modern myth of mechanisation.

A space presided over by Polyester Cord and Cavallino, surrounded by other works of various dimensions and techniques: oils, charcoal and graphite drawings, sculptures, reliefs, and prints. The viewer is invited not to limit themselves to a general view from a distance. It is worth getting closer to see that these two main, large-scale works are the result of the repetition of small, basic geometric forms.

Realising this allows us to discover other, apparently more modest, works where the outer form of the tyre has disappeared. What remains are simple abstract images composed only of geometric elements similar to an elementary construction directly related to minimalism. From the real world remain only some enigmatic names — M + S Contact, for example — which are nothing more than the proper names of the models that inspired them.

The disappearance of any sign of figuration is even clearer in another nearby work: 195 VR 14 (1975). It is a large, square work, three metres on each side, also constructed from elementary geometric signs — almost unicellular units organised into horizontal black bands following the rhythm and logic of repetition.

Room C
In Room C, yet another unexpected change. Peter Stämpfli’s ongoing research into new, still-unexplored pictorial possibilities leads, from 1990 onwards, to a spectacular rebirth of colour. The rigorous geometry of forms that can only distantly be linked to a derivation of the tyre is flooded with peculiar, flat, vivid colour fields — reds, oranges, yellows, blacks, blues — that play with our gaze to inspire our imagination.

The reference to the representational world has definitively disappeared, while the works in this room allow us to explore the brilliance of the nuances of oil paint, acrylic paint, watercolour, and pastel.

Since 1963, we have crossed a bridge that, over nearly forty years, has led us from the banal world of everyday objects to the radicality of abstraction, disproving the supposed incompatibility between formalism and representation.