Favorite Pictures from the Collection: A Selection by Hermann Mathis

For the second time already, the Glarus Art Museum has invited a culturally interested person from the canton of Glarus to select personal favorites from the collection of the Glarus Art Society. This time, Hermann Mathis, an organ builder from Näfels, has sifted through the collection and now presents his personal selection of works.
Since the founding of the Glarus Art Museum in 1870, the various Boards of Trustees have primarily bought paintings, but also sculptures and graphics. This collection has therefore grown organically over a long period of time and is heterogeneous, and hardly any focus area can be discerned. The question repeatedly arises how and according to which criteria such a collection can and should be presented. Inviting individuals who are not professionally engaged in the visual arts to put together an exhibition with their favorite pictures is an idea that arose from the question of which pictures the public might like to see. Are they the well-known masterpieces by Hodler, Kirchner, and Vallotton? Are they the pictures that have rarely been exhibited in recent years, but which contain a personal memory for someone? Hermann Mathis has compiled his selection of pictures based on the principle of a labyrinth. Disregarding any art-historical criteria, he sought out pictures that fit into the ordering system (based on introitus, centrum, exitus) that has existed for millennia. The core idea of a labyrinth is that is conceals a mystery, an irrational message. The visitor to the labyrinth is slowly drawn toward this irrationality (introitus), discovers the mystery (centrum), and is led back again into the normal world (exitus). By viewing the works, the visitor to the exhibition is invited to find his or her own path through the mental labyrinth constructed by the pictures.