Kunstmuseum Thun - Böcker

Intense visual experiencesIn her paintings, Rebekka Steiger takes us into strange and colorful dream worlds. Sometimes flowery, sometimes eerie, her paintings are characterized by the dialectic of statics and movement. Steiger's pictures show landscapes, trees, and figures, which she combines into unfinished stories that are sometimes reminiscent of myths and legends. Drawing-like brushstrokes and painterly gestures are superimposed on her canvases to create colorful, dense compositions. The artist's first comprehensive monograph entitled Bingfeng is being published to coincide with the exhibition at Kunstmuseum Thun. With a foreword by Helen Hirsch and essays by Claudia Jolles, Patricia Bieder, Sophia Remer, Peter Stohler, Chiara Ottavi and texts by the artist.

The Bauhaus master Johannes Ittenis one of the prominent protagonists of early Modernism in twentieth-century art. Few people are aware of the close links between his beginnings as an artist and his experience of landscape and nature in the town of Thun and Lake Thun. Johannes Itten gained decisive impulses for the development of his concept of art and his path towards abstraction through various stations and sojourns in Thun and its surroundings. By means of examples of the representations of nature in his early work the publication shows in scholarly depth how Itten discovered his own, very personal and later internationally famous approach to art and painting style and presents his pictorial transformation of natureextending through to the artist’s late works.

At the centre of René Myrha’s (*1939) expressive oeuvre lie landscapes and rigorous compositional room perspectives which are transformed into stage-like settings. They form the scenery for the choreography of his figures. Myrha examines them through specific media in drawings, oil, acrylic, sculpture and reliefs.Born in Delsberg in Switzerland, the painter encountered the contemporary movements of art and design during the 1960s in Paris and Milan. In the foreground of his activities lie forms and volumes which combine and breakthrough constructed and organically created spaces. In his later works they are animated by a surreal figural universe. The publication shows a representative cross-section of Myrha‘s oeuvre, from Pop Art to an obsessive preoccupation with a mysterious and dramatic world of figures.