Peter Stämpfli
«Waiting»
The Swiss artist Peter Stämpfli settled in Paris as early as 1959 and very quickly embarked on an international career, represented by prestigious galleries such as Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich and Jean Larcade in Paris. Isolated on a pristine white background, the character in Autoportrait au raglan, just as the dashboard of Ma voiture, painted with as much precision as detachment, already appeared in 1963 as one of the rare immediate European responses to the surge of American Pop Art. «Like other European artists who began to draw on the eye-catching and large-scale imagery of advertising, posters, photography and cinema, in order to achieve a figurative art that, reconfigured, would be capable of rivaling abstraction in terms of intensity and formal impact, Stämpfli felt comforted in his new direction by American and British Pop Art.» (Marco Livingstone).
Starting in 1966, focusing on an object particularly representative of consumer society, the car, and then, from 1970 onwards, restricting himself to the tire and precisely the tread, Peter Stämpfli – through the extreme enlargement of what he calls (paradoxically) the «tire sculpture» – develops a radically new pictorial language. From this unique subject, he revisits the history of geometric abstraction and transforms an ordinary theme illustrating «the power of art to convert any element into aesthetic qualities». (Henry Martin, Art International, 1971). The unity of the subject is for Stämpfli the means of questioning, without ever repeating, all the techniques and means of painting. By working precisely and obsessively on the tire impression, Peter Stämpfli has made this motif his signature. Peter Stämpfli’s works have been included in numerous public collections. Among them: the MoMA in New York, the Georges-Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Kunstmuseum in Zurich.
