For our second collection exhibition featuring a specific aspect of the work of an artist represented in our collections, we are presenting a significant portion of Greta Leuzinger’s print-and graphic-based works. Over the course of her career, Leuzinger focused not only on painting but, to a large extent, also on the mediums of printmaking, etching, and drawing. A comprehensive body of work was created that incorporates recurring motifs, often with small birds. In other series, dogs, anteaters, and other animals are also depicted. These drawings are characterized by their narrative tension, generated solely via the specific configuration of just a few, simple elements. Leuzinger creates lines and scratches on the image surface. Abstract means are used to generate the “action” of a particular scenery. With sparsely placed lines reminiscent of scratches in stone, the artist creates a bold, dynamic pictorial setting that alternates between illustration, cipher, and abstraction. Birds, often hand-colored in a pointed manner, seemingly create an entirely idiosyncratic complex of meaning. With simple means, Leuzinger depicts small-scale, self-contained, immediately accessible settings. Although straightforward in design, their resoluteness is nevertheless both factual and abstract at the same time. They are never bearers of individual mythologies. Rather, in the dynamic interplay of lines, scratches, and the configuration of birds and other animals, certain “states of being” can be imagined that facilitate collective understanding as well as an appreciation for the value of a phenomenology of a seemingly open-ended constellation. Greta Leuzinger was a passionate observer of animals, and birds in particular.

The Estate of Greta Leuzinger became part of the Glarner Kunstverein Collection in 2009. The holdings include prints, paintings, and textual material such as newspaper columns and personal notes.

b. 1912 in Glarus. d. 2009 in Ennenda.