Christian Megert
Early Works from the 1950 | 60s from Paris and Berne
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How can it be that Christian Megert’s first, very early paintings were shown directly from the studio between 1955 and 1960 in exhibitions in Bern, Lausanne and Paris, in Barcelona, Copenhagen, Leverkusen and Recklinghausen, but were never shown again in Switzerland in the following almost seven decades?
ON THE WAY TO THE MIRROR
Now, with the exhibition of a select group at Galerie Dierking, the interested Swiss public finally has the opportunity to encounter the first valid body of work by Christian Megert, the artist who, from 1961, when he was only 25 years old, had already lost his label and has since been regarded as the one with the mirrors. In addition to the great surprise that the Swiss premiere is only now taking place, it may also come as a surprise that it is taking place in Zurich and not in Bern: After all, Megert was a formative figure in the vibrant Bernese art scene from the mid-1950s until his move to Düsseldorf in 1973, and he has always remained connected to his second home in Bern in the half-century since then.
Although he did not grow up in an art-loving home, Christian Megert, born in 1936, was already friends with artists as a schoolboy. The 16-year-old’s career goal was architecture, but he first had to complete an apprenticeship as a bricklayer. As an apprentice, he attended courses for the artistic trade at the Bern Trade School, such as technical and nude drawing or colour theory. His friends included Dieter Roth and Marcel Wyss, who were a few years older than him and who, together with Eugen Gomringer, published “spirale”, the important magazine on constructive-concrete art, from 1953, as well as the then apprentice potter and later clown Dimitri and the art history student and cabaret artist Harry Szeemann, who later became director of the Kunsthalle Bern. Megert worked closely with him in the sixties organising critical, legendary exhibitions.
However, we are solely concerned with the few but incredibly dense years between 1955, when Megert, as he later recalled, “set out in search of art”, and 1959/60, when he began experimenting with mirrors.
In 1959, he integrated glass and mirror elements into his paintings for the first time, and in 1961, his first mirror-only exhibition was held at the Køpcke Gallery in Copenhagen, for which he wrote a statement calling on the public to overcome the role of passive art viewers.
In 1956, Megert created his first white monochrome paintings, in 1957 grey and white structural paintings, which already indicated the direction towards relief, and from 1958 onwards, often strongly material-emphasised pictorial objects, called “essais” in white, brown or the aforementioned “indefinable earth colours”, the smaller ones on coarse jute, the larger ones, also heavy, on fibreboard. They are informal works in the literal sense, although one hesitates to use the term for them, as it has become established for a particular style and attitude in painting, from which Megert consciously and avowedly wanted to distance himself.
The current selection of works stringently demonstrates the path this artist took in his younger years - even if the path was probably not so straightforward - from painting to overcoming it to the massively constructed pictorial object.
These are works that most of us are seeing for the first time. This is surprising because of their outstanding quality and firm and secure position in modern art history. The good thing about this first encounter is that they are incredibly fresh; although they can be dated, they have not been appropriated by art history, and we encounter them surprisingly directly and unexpectedly. It is also an exhilarating experience.
Christian Megert began experimenting with the mirror in 1959. To expand the pictorial space, he implemented pieces of glass and mirror into the impasto painting and relief material. As a result, this simple yet complex and elusive object offered him infinite possibilities, which the artist has been utilising intensively and playfully for over six decades.
When Christian Megert was invited to his most important early international exhibition in 1960, the legendary thematic exhibition “Monochrome Painting” curated by Udo Kultermann at the Museum Morsbroich Leverkusen, he was by far the youngest participant, along with his now forgotten Bernese colleague Rudolf Leuzinger. Among the oldest were Willi Baumeister, Lucio Fontana and Mark Rothko, who were born around 1900, and the youngest included the one and only female painter Yayoi Kusama and the ZERO artists Mack, Piene, Uecker, Verheyen and Manzoni, as well as Megert’s early friend Arnulf Rainer. It was an epochal exhibition, also a response to the documenta and its celebration of American Action Painting and European Informel.
It was correct and absolutely right that Megert was represented in this internationally important and highly regarded exhibition with a 1959 composition that tended towards relief. However, at the time of the exhibition, he was already in the process of bidding farewell to painting for good. By 1960, the 24-year-old artist was already on a different path.
Christian Megert
Early Works from the 1950 | 60s from Paris and Berne
-
ON THE WAY TO THE MIRROR
How can it be that Christian Megert’s first, very early paintings were shown directly from the studio between 1955 and 1960 in exhibitions in Bern, Lausanne and Paris, in Barcelona, Copenhagen, Leverkusen and Recklinghausen, but were never shown again in Switzerland in the following almost seven decades?
Now, with the exhibition of a select group at Galerie Dierking, the interested Swiss public finally has the opportunity to encounter the first valid body of work by Christian Megert, the artist who, from 1961, when he was only 25 years old, had already lost his label and has since been regarded as the one with the mirrors. In addition to the great surprise that the Swiss premiere is only now taking place, it may also come as a surprise that it is taking place in Zurich and not in Bern: After all, Megert was a formative figure in the vibrant Bernese art scene from the mid-1950s until his move to Düsseldorf in 1973, and he has always remained connected to his second home in Bern in the half-century since then.
Although he did not grow up in an art-loving home, Christian Megert, born in 1936, was already friends with artists as a schoolboy. The 16-year-old’s career goal was architecture, but he first had to complete an apprenticeship as a bricklayer. As an apprentice, he attended courses for the artistic trade at the Bern Trade School, such as technical and nude drawing or colour theory. His friends included Dieter Roth and Marcel Wyss, who were a few years older than him and who, together with Eugen Gomringer, published “spirale”, the important magazine on constructive-concrete art, from 1953, as well as the then apprentice potter and later clown Dimitri and the art history student and cabaret artist Harry Szeemann, who later became director of the Kunsthalle Bern. Megert worked closely with him in the sixties organising critical, legendary exhibitions.
However, we are solely concerned with the few but incredibly dense years between 1955, when Megert, as he later recalled, “set out in search of art”, and 1959/60, when he began experimenting with mirrors.
In 1959, he integrated glass and mirror elements into his paintings for the first time, and in 1961, his first mirror-only exhibition was held at the Køpcke Gallery in Copenhagen, for which he wrote a statement calling on the public to overcome the role of passive art viewers.
In 1956, Megert created his first white monochrome paintings, in 1957 grey and white structural paintings, which already indicated the direction towards relief, and from 1958 onwards, often strongly material-emphasised pictorial objects, called “essais” in white, brown or the aforementioned “indefinable earth colours”, the smaller ones on coarse jute, the larger ones, also heavy, on fibreboard. They are informal works in the literal sense, although one hesitates to use the term for them, as it has become established for a particular style and attitude in painting, from which Megert consciously and avowedly wanted to distance himself.
The current selection of works stringently demonstrates the path this artist took in his younger years - even if the path was probably not so straightforward - from painting to overcoming it to the massively constructed pictorial object.
These are works that most of us are seeing for the first time. This is surprising because of their outstanding quality and firm and secure position in modern art history. The good thing about this first encounter is that they are incredibly fresh; although they can be dated, they have not been appropriated by art history, and we encounter them surprisingly directly and unexpectedly. It is also an exhilarating experience.
Christian Megert began experimenting with the mirror in 1959. To expand the pictorial space, he implemented pieces of glass and mirror into the impasto painting and relief material. As a result, this simple yet complex and elusive object offered him infinite possibilities, which the artist has been utilising intensively and playfully for over six decades.
When Christian Megert was invited to his most important early international exhibition in 1960, the legendary thematic exhibition “Monochrome Painting” curated by Udo Kultermann at the Museum Morsbroich Leverkusen, he was by far the youngest participant, along with his now forgotten Bernese colleague Rudolf Leuzinger. Among the oldest were Willi Baumeister, Lucio Fontana and Mark Rothko, who were born around 1900, and the youngest included the one and only female painter Yayoi Kusama and the ZERO artists Mack, Piene, Uecker, Verheyen and Manzoni, as well as Megert’s early friend Arnulf Rainer. It was an epochal exhibition, also a response to the documenta and its celebration of American Action Painting and European Informel.
It was correct and absolutely right that Megert was represented in this internationally important and highly regarded exhibition with a 1959 composition that tended towards relief. However, at the time of the exhibition, he was already in the process of bidding farewell to painting for good. By 1960, the 24-year-old artist was already on a different path.
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21. Dec 2022 -
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