Peter Stämpfli — Ligne continue — Galerie G-P & N Vallois — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 28 → May 27, 2017

Peter Stämpfli was born in 1937 in Deisswil (Switzerland).
This major Swiss artist has been included in outstanding projects from the start such as the 3rd Paris Biennial in 1963 or the Swiss Pavilion of the 1970 Venice Biennial. At the beginning of the 60s, Peter Stämpfli is discovered by prestigious galleries such as Bruno Bischofberger in Zürich and Jean Larcade in Paris.

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“Like other European artists who had begun to look to the brash imagery and large scale of advertising, poster art, photography and the cinema as sources of inspiration for a reconfigured representational art that could rival the intensity and formal impact of abstraction, Stämpfli was encouraged to pursue this new direction by his awareness of American and British Pop Art (…). Stämpfli first car painting, “Ma voiture”, had been made in 1963 (…). Since 1969 Stämpfli has kept rigorously to his decision to limit himself to a single subject — pneumatic car tyres and the tracks they make — as the basis for ingenious variations encompassing oil paintings on a monumental scale, vast
site-specific murals and sculptures, intricately worked lead pencil drawings, gouaches, watercolours and pastels ablaze with colour (…). Stämpfli is by no means alone among modern artists in limiting himself so severely to a signature style or image, but he is certainly exceptional in aligning himself so forcefully with an object of such banal ordinariness that no meaning can be read into it other than as a sign of modern technology: an immediately accessible symbol of car culture which insists on the impact of machinery and assembly-line production on the urbanization of the landscape in developed nations.”

Marco Livingstone

With a very realistic and ordinary theme (a tire mark) Peter Stämpfli illustrates “the power of the art to convert every elements with aesthetical qualities.”

Henry Martin, Art International, 1971

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For Ligne continue, his first show at the gallery, Peter Stämpfli has conceived the exhibition as a whole project, a “continuous line” from his remarkable video from 1974 in which the road becomes a hypnotic pattern — an almost psychedelic experience — to an in situ installation drawn especially for the window of our space 33 rue de Seine. It will be the occasion to discover a set of paintings and drawings from the 90s never shown in Paris. A joyful experiment to announce our new collaboration… That will continue in September 2018 with a solo exhibition dedicated to Stämpfli’s works from the 60s.

_33 rue de Seine _