Werner Frei

A perhaps forgotten master from Zollikon Zurich, who died in 1983. His works are of a freshness and radiance that is hard to match, and it is astonishing how much of it is reappearing stylistically in the works of contemporary artists today. He was a humanist, a philanthropist and someone who is fondly remembered by all who knew him. And, in particular, he was a genial artist whose oeuvre ranges stylistically from impressionistic portraits, landscapes and still lifes, to wild, tachistic abstraction, to a pioneering ‘Concrete Impressionism’ and minimalism.

Born in 1907 in Rickenbach, in the Zürcher Weinland. Self-taught. Life drawing at the Kunstgewerbeschule, ETH and the E. Wehrli painting school in Zurich. Then travelled through Paris and the south of France to inspire his art and create. In the 1940s, still attached to representationalism, he slowly but surely developed freer painting styles. From 1942 he worked as a freelance artist. After study trips to Rome, Berlin and London at the end of the 1940s, his works began to mutate. 1952 solo at the legendary O’hana Gallery in London where some of the most important arists of their time were shown. In 1960 the art movements of Tachism and Informel spread from Paris to Switzerland, influencing artists, especially the younger generation. Werner Frei also explored this new and controversial movement, whereby the painting process itself became the subject of the picture. Numerous exhibitions in art spaces and galleries in Switzerland followed as well as a show in 1962 at the Shirokiya Gallery in Tokyo, Japan and large scale public projects for the SBB, among others. Frei had exhibitions at a regular interval at the most vibrant and most important contemporary art gallery in Zurich at the time: the legendary Galerie Pallette. The 1970s were a period of calm and meditation: simplification and reduction of means as an expression of reason and spirit. Everything unnecessary was omitted; rhythm, color harmony, and emptiness were the actual artistic means with which Werner Frei worked in his final phase. The highlight was a retrospective organised by the Kunsthaus Zurich with a focus on his last creative period at the Helmhaus Zurich in 1977.

CLICK HERE FOR HIS FULL CV

view exhibitions at the gallery

Artist’s website: werner-frei.ch/home/

SELECTED WORKS: