Hans Emmenegger

It is more than twenty-five years since the work of the idiosyncratic painter Hans Emmenegger from central Switzerland was made accessible to a wider public. The great stylist, who has always been situated somewhere between Hodler and Böcklin, created a wide-ranging oeuvre, 166 works of which are called up in this exhibition catalogue – at present, incidentally, the only publication available. What is special about Emmenegger’s landscapes and still lifes, but also about individual nudes and his depictions of animals and architecture, is a certain melancholy conveyed in the pictures, one that probably corresponds to his longing for the “magnificently bleak, lonely region” of central Switzerland. Anyone wishing to go a little further will see in the hills, the bare trees and sparse melting snows, in the shady edges of woods with their incised patches of sunlight, precursors of present-day realist painting such as that of a Franz Gertsch or a Gerhard Richter.

Exhibition:
Kunstmuseum Luzern, 5/7 – 12/10/2104