Johannes Robert Schürch (1895–1941) is considered to be one of the main representatives of early modernism in Swiss art. It is therefore all the more surprising that the work of the Aarau-born artist is hardly known to a wider public today. Almost 50 years after the retrospective at the Aargauer Kunsthaus, the exhibition Alles sehen, or See all in English, is bringing the touching and haunting work of this outstanding draughtsman back into focus. The largely self-taught artist left behind an extensive and stylistically varied body of work comprising more than 7000 works when he died at the young age of 46.

The solo exhibition at the Aargauer Kunsthaus is dedicated to his drawings from the 1920s and early 1930s. It provides insight into the artist’s most productive phase, during which he created numerous pen and ink-brush drawings and watercolours. In their direct expressiveness, these are among his artistic highlights. Schürch created these works in the ten years he lived with his mother in poverty and seclusion in a remote forest house in Monti, near Locarno.

With its thematically focused structure, the exhibition invites visitors to take an associative stroll through Schürch’s artistic cosmos. Interwoven circles of motifs touch on universal concepts of human existence: death, grief, suffering, and oppression as well as the longing for belonging, closeness, and love. Schürch’s view of human vulnerability is reflected in our present, as it is characterized by uncertainty and crises.

Lyrical contributions from the writer Simone Lappert (b. 1985) complement the exhibition. Her poems on selected works highlight the timeless validity of Schürch’s drawings. The poems are available as an audio track via QR codes and can also be found in the accompanying publication, Johannes Robert Schürch. Alles sehen (2024).