The Glarus artist Greta Leuzinger (b1912 in Glarus, lives and works in Zurich) has already painted and etched for over 50 years. The Glarus Art Museum is now devoting a first retrospective to the artist with a focus on her painting since the early 60‘s.
All her life, the artist has been interested in the simple and fundamental in life: the relationship of human beings to nature, creature, and space. With the simplest, reduced means, she realizes her image ideas. It becomes apparent that her painting has always developed in a close relationship with etching when one notices the importance of the line in her work or discovers the elements often etched from the priming. Taking an overall view of the development of Greta Leuzinger’s work, it can be observed how she has increasingly found her own personal language of forms. Inspired by her study trips to Paris, where the artist learned the craft of etching from Stanley William Hayter (1955, 1958, and 1962), Greta Leuzinger painted her early pictures under the influence of the Paris tendencies of the 50‘s, especially ‹lyrical abstraction›. Her characteristic, pictographic symbols, which set the tone of her vocabulary until today, already surfaced in her compositions from the mid 60‘s. They are ever recurring, allegorical motifs – stylized elements of nature – which not coincidentally recall neolithic rock etchings, since the artist visited the caves of Lascaux already in 1956 and later (1966 and 1970) the drawings etched into stone in the Val Camonica of Lombardy. A motif stretching as a central thread through the painting and graphical work of Greta Leuzinger is the bird – totem and existential cipher of the artist.
In the Glarus Art Museum, the newest etchings (2003) of Greta Leuzinger will be presented in addition to her pictures.