Peter Stämpfli — À propos — Slash Paris

Swiss artist Peter Stämpfli has settled in Paris since 1959, and
established very rapidly his career in the international art scene,
being represented by prestigious galleries such Bruno Bischofberger
in Zürich and Jean Larcade in Paris.

Isolated on a plain white background, the character from
“Autoportrait au raglan“ (“Self-portrait with raglan“), as well as
this dashboard of a car from “Ma voiture“ (“My car“), both painted
with much accuracy as distance, appear in 1963 already as a rare
immediate answer in Europe in the surge of American Pop Art.

“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.“ (Marco
Livingstone)

From 1966 onwards, he focused on a particular object of the
consumer society — automobiles — and from 1970 on he restricted
himself to tires, and precisely to tire treads. Peter Stämpfli developed
a radically new pictorial language which featured an extremely
magnified image of what he (paradoxically) calls the “sculpture of
tire.“

From this sole and specific subject, he revisited the history of
geometrical abstraction, transforming a very ordinary theme to
illustrate “the power of the art to convert every elements with
aesthetical qualities.“ (Henry Martin, in Art International, 1971)
This single subject is, for Stämpfli, a way to question, without ever
repeating himself, every technique and means employed in the
execution of the painting.

Working precisely and obsessively on tire tread prints, Stämpfli
made this pattern his signature.

Today Peter Stämpfli’s works are part of many public collections.
Among them are: the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the
Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris, the Kunstmuseum in Zürich.