Jürg Kreienbühl


Jürg Kreienbühl was a Swiss and French painter.

Life

After his high school graduation, Jürg Kreienbühl hesitated between pursuing scientific or artistic studies and finally completed an apprenticeship as a house painter in Basel. Earning a scholarship from his city, he traveled to Paris in 1956 to work and to make a living from his painting.
He first settled in Colombes where he painted rubbish tips, cemeteries and decomposing bodies of animals. Two years later, he ended up to move to the slum area of Bezons near Paris in an old wheelless bus. There he lived in difficult conditions among homeless, gypsies and North Africans who became his friends and models. Four years later, he left the slum to settle in an apartment near Argenteuil. The sales of some paintings enabled him to buy a "caravan-studio" and to keep on describing from nature, during more than a decade, the life in the slums and its population : social outcasts, prostitutes, vagrants and disabled people. In 1973, a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at Kunsthaus Museum in Aarau.
In the 1970s, Jürg Kreienbühl started to work on new subjects and to practice again etching and lithography that he could work in his home in Cormeilles-en-Parisis. In 1974, he made his first painting in the Jardin des plantes, “Hommage à Cuvier”. One year later, he found by accident a former factory of unsold terra cotta saints for churches in Vendeuvre-sur-Barse: he painted there a series a terra cotta figures lying on dusty grounds. He also spent a lot of time in Le Havre where he painted industrial pollution and the France liner which had to be demolished.
In 1982, Jürg Kreienbühl was invited to visit the Gallery of Zoology of the French National Museum of Natural History, in Paris. Because of disrepair reasons, the gallery was closed since 1965 and was no longer accessible to public. Fascinated by the damaged replica of animals and the scientific heritage of this place, he worked in the museum during three years where he realized about 60 paintings. Over the years, his subjects included the building site of La Défense, the park sculpture of Bernhard Luginbühl in Mötschwil, the nuclear power station in Gravelines and the port of Dunkirk, and the Warteck brewery in Basel.
Over the last ten years of his life, Jürg Kreienbühl worked on the catalogue raisonné of his prints and on the monography Malerei der Leidenschaft, both published in 1998. Some important exhibitions were held at Musée de Gravelines, Centre culturel Suisse in Paris and Centre d’art Jacques-Henri Lartigue in L’Isle-Adam. After his death in 2007 in Cormeille-en-Parisis, his work is being progressively rediscovered and joined the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Museum of Fine Arts of Rennes in 2017.

Work

Although influenced at his beginnings by an expressionist manner like Lovis Corinth or Chaïm Soutine, his work turned quite quickly to an uncompromising realism. Willing to show the reality in the raw, he made himself the witness or the chronicler of the end times, by documenting the condemned worlds by the evolution of society : the old beliefs, the social outcasts and the life in the fringe and the ravages from urbanization and industrialization. According to Le Monde art critic Philippe Dagen, Jürg Kreienbühl "could be seen as the first photorealist of the Parisian painting in the 1960’s. He can also be seen as the predecessor of those who make their art a disillusioned social and architectural chronicle".
His realist approach does not aim to reproduce strictly his natural environment but "to go beyond reality through the reality"as written by Leonard Ginsburg. His conception of realism has to be linked to his use of LSD in his youth, under the supervision of his friend Albert Hofmann who evoke it in his book "LSD - My Problem Child". Since this experiment, the visible world is for the painter the vehicle of another reality, hidden, omnipresent but invisible. That's why Albert Hoffman wrote about him that he was "both a painter and mystic".

Exhibitions (Selection)

Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau; Kunstmuseum, Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, Basel; Christoph Merian Stiftung, Basel; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Beauvais; Musée du Dessin et de l’Estampe Originale de Gravelines; Musée Louis Senlecq, L’Isle-Adam; Bibliothèque nationale, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Collection de la ville de Paris; FRAC Ile-de-France, Paris; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes; Musée de l’Isle de France, Sceaux

Publications