Dorothee Messmer – författare

Born as the youngest of a poor Swiss farming family's seven children, Adolf Dietrich (1877-1957) supplemented arduous farm work and various jobs in a textile mill, as a woodcutter, and railway worker, with art. Gaining increasing recognition in Germany and Switzerland, his participation in the exhibition Les maîtres populaires de la réalité in Paris, Zürich, and New York in 1937-38 marked his breakthrough internationally. Until today, Dietrich's work is regarded by some as a prime example of 20th-century naïve painting, while other scholars place him closer to the post-expressionist movement of New Objectivity.For the first time in nearly sixty years, Dietrich's work has been shown in a vast retrospective at Kunstmuseum Olten in Switzerland, in summer 2015 in which his pictures were accompanied by paintings of artists such as Cuno Amiet, Otto Dix, Giovanni Giacometti, Ferdinand Hodler, Henri Rousseau, or Félix Vallotton. This coinciding new monograph is richly illustrated in colour throughout, featuring some 160 works by Dietrich and the other artists. The essays contextualise his art and highlight Dietrichs' lasting significance.Text in English and German.

Nives Widauer: Villa Nix features a retrospective of Nives Widauer's oeuvre of three decades. The book documents the the Vienna-based Swiss artist's two-part exhibition at Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris and at Kunstmuseum Olten in summer and autumn 2020. The Paris show, titled Antichambre, was a prelude and subsequently integrated entirely into the larger presentation Villa Nix at Kunstmuseum Olten, the latter's architecture allowing the actual experience of seven different rooms at Widauer's imaginary house.As the title suggests, Widauer created for her art a home that is accessible for visitors, who can delve into and explore her imaginary mental spaces and her physical installations and works. Both the villa's and the artist's names are variations of the latin term for snow. The rooms at Villa Nix are intimate, historic and dense spaces in which she arranges a closely selected constellation of her work, thus creating resonating environments as an antichambre, an archive, a garden, or the unknown room. They work as mnemonic spaces and are at the same time rich in historic and cultural connotations while structuring the book like chapters. Introductory texts and conversations reflect the character of these spaces and the artworks they house. Text in English, French and German.Published to accompany an exhibition Nives Widauer: VILLA NIX, at the Kunstmuseum Olten, Switzerland between 21 September and 17 November 2019.