22 x 28 cm

ISBN 978-3-03942-053-7

In recent years, Swiss artist Franz Bucher, born in 1940, has produced an extensive series of paintings which he simply titles Fields: lavender, dandelion, rapeseed, and poppy fields congruent with the canvas to form a pictorial field. Yet Bucher’s objective is not primarily the pictorial. Rather, it is more about the two-dimensional space which is given an inherent structure by the largely monochromatic primary colors he uses, as well as his dynamic brushstroke. It becomes apparent that most of the artist’s oeuvre since the early 1970s has been determined by the metrical rhythm in his use of color. Bucher’s paintings constitute actual energy fields.

This new monograph offers a retrospective of Bucher’s entire body of work from the vantage point of his recent pictorial fields. It thus illustrates his true artistic intentions independently of the context of his chosen motifs.

Beat Stutzer is a Lucerne-based art historian, writer, and curator. He served as director of the Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur from 1982–2011 and as curator of the Segantini Museum in St. Moritz from 1998–2016.