ALBRECHT SCHNIDER – BEYOND THE VANISHED

Failure and repetition are part of the artistic work of Albrecht Schnider. Even after 30 years of international recognition, the Swiss artist shows himself with unusual openness in his struggle for the uniqueness of a visual moment that withstands his critical eye. The viewer is with increasing tension and expectation on the difficult path to the one valid picture involved. The filmmaker Rita Ziegler first met Albrecht Schnider just at a time when he began a new group of works which allowed him, as it did in drawing, to reduce himself to the minimum and find great things with the least amount of effort. Over the course of three years, Rita Ziegler accompanied Albrecht Schnider with uncanny patience in his critical search for images, as he paints the same graphic gesture again and again, rejects it and wipes it away. After weeks, even months, Ziegler succeeds in capturing completion of two images with the camera – capturing a magical moment for Schnider, when a „picture looks back“ and he leaves it alone. In the shared concentration of the unusually long collaboration grew a familiarity in which Schnider was increasingly able to speak about what moves him to work. In addition to the new paintings, which are produced directly on small-format canvases, Albrecht Schnider also makes huge acrylic paintings in industrial-like production. Particularly in this juxtaposition of intuitive search and cool distance lies the peculiarity of the artist; contradictions that also shape his way of life. The shy, versatile painter reflects upon his experiences made in a successful 30-year career as an artist. As one of the most important artists in Switzerland and with notable international recogni- tion, he is represented by Galleries in Berlin, Zurich, Amsterdam, New York, Frankfurt and Geneva. Born as the son of a mountain farmer in Sörenberg, after completing high school and convent school, Schnider went on to study at the University and School of Design in Bern, where he teaches today at the College of Arts. He has lived in Rome, Brussels and Berlin, before recently returning to Switzerland, where he resides in a village on Lake Thun. This is the right place, he says, where he can pursue his search and his work in a concentrated calm.