Jürg Kreienbühl

Jürg Kreienbühl , born with Basle the August 12th 1932 and deceased with Cormeilles-in-Parisis the October 30th 2007 is a painter Suisse and French.

Summary biography

The first formation of Jürg Krienbühl will have been the Biologie. For the ornithologist Hans Noll it will parcourera Switzerland in the search of thousands of pelottes of rejection of raptors. In 1951, having given up the scientific way, it is registered at the school of the Art schools of Basle.

At the same time it is employed by a company of house painting where it learns how to paint false marbles and false wood.

Shantytowns

At its exit of the Art schools, it paints heaps of refuse and corpses of animals. A little extreme for Switzerland perhaps: the town of Basle grants a purse to him so that it settles in Parisian suburbs, with Colombes, where it paints cemeteries and discharges of refuse. The purse will be prolonged but finally, for lack of money, the painter will have to go back to Basle in 1958. After having sold some fabrics exposed in a house in the process of demolition, it turns over to France and is established in a Bidonville of Bezons where it buys an old bus. It makes the portrait of the inhabitants of the shantytown: Arabs, Gipsies, Pole. In 1962 it buys a small apartment in Argenteuil (and later a country house with Cormeilles-in-Parisis, city located close to Argenteuil) and marries the painter Suzane Lopata. His/her son Stephan (the future painter Stephan Belzère) will be born in 1963. Its workshop is then roulotte installed in a waste ground of the Career-on-Seine. At the end of the Sixties, beginning of the year seventy, Jürg Kreienbühl will paint in particular in Normandy and in Le Havre while returning to its shantytowns of the Paris region. It exposes to Zurich, Bern and Basle.

In 1973 takes place its first great retrospective with the museum of the fine arts of Aarau.

In 1974, Kreienbühl paints a “homage to Cuvier” with the Botanical garden. At that time it also will paint in the village of Hedgehog (To combine) then in an old factory of saints of terra cotta church. In 1976, it exposes to the gallery of Luxembourg (today Galerie Alain Blondel) and in Zurich. Towards the end of the year seventy, the large shantytowns which surround Paris are dismantled. Kreienbühl then paints the France steamer, pollution, etc With Defense it paints the monument of the sculptor Barrias, abandoned on a waste ground. Exposures to Basle, Zurich, Neuchâtel, and with the Blondel Gallery, Paris.

The Gallery of Zoology

In 1982, it discovers the Gallery of Zoology to the Muséum of natural history of Paris, a monumental place, closed with the public since years, completely left with the abandonment. It will work there without slackening until an exposure of its paintings is organized to the Botanical garden in 1985. The same year it exposes to the museum of the Art schools d' Aarau. The following year it exposes to the museum of natural history of Lausanne its paintings carried out with the Gallery of Zoology. Two years later, it will be with the museum of natural history of Basle.

The years 1990-2000

As from the Eighties ten, it will paint successively in the Warteck brewery in Basle, the museum of natural history of Basle and in the garden of the sculptor Bernhard Luginbühl. Each winter it will return to France to be devoted to the Estampe - Taille-douce and Lithographie. In France it will also paint around Paris, with the museum of the French monuments, in the port of Dunkirk or around the nuclear plant of Gravelines.

In 1998, the museum of the print with Gravelines organizes a retrospective of its engraved and lithographed work. In 2001 it is the Swiss Arts center, in Paris, which organizes a retrospective of its painted work. At the same time, Jacques Tardi and Daniel Pennac slip a portrait of Kreienbühl into their album the vice (Gallimard). Same the Daniel Pennac publishes in 2007 an interview of Kreienbühl in its book Chagrin of school .

Work

The painting of Jürg Kreienbühl is, and this since its beginnings, a brutal juxtaposition of the concepts of tradition and modernity .

Tradition, because it paints against all the artistic currents of second half of the XXe century: referring more readily to Gustave Caillebotte or even to painters now considered firemen, as Meissonnier, that with the modern , abstract or conceptual. But in same time, its subjects are not haystacks nicely made up under a setting sun: it paints contemporary constructions, like Defense, waste which the man produces, or its wrecks, which one lets lose… Formerly legendary steamers, high places of industry given up, etc

From the point of view of the techniques of painting, the same conflict takes place: in spite of a pictorial technique which refers readily to the painting of the XIXe century, Kreienbühl paints the majority of its tables not on fabric but on Isorel, and it does not use oil but paintings vinyls - besides it forms part of the small group of the first painters to have chosen this technique, during the Sixties.

According to the critic Philippe Dagen, Jürg Kreienbühl could be held for the first hyperrealist of Parisian painting in the years 1960. It can also appear as the predecessor of those which make today of their art the means of a social and architectural chronicle disillusioned.

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