STEPHAN SPICHER

The one-man show of the Swiss artist Stephan Spicher presents more than forty works from the Blossom series (2006). The art critics define the school in which Stephan Spicher works as Minimalism (concerning the works of the period of linear compositions) and as Abstract Expressionism (concerning his recent works). Both schools are aimed at abandoning representation and the use of reductionist strategies. The works from the Blossom series exhibited in the Russian Museum represent abstract formulae, colour arabesque: the concept is realized with the help of pure painting - the dramaturgy of the line, patch and colour. There is no representation, no manifestations of the mimetic. At the same time the artist is clearly concerned by the relationship with the organic. In order to visualise this relationship, he chooses a special channel, which is not mimetic, but mythical-poetic. So if one pole of Spicher's art is reduction to pure abstraction, the other is the sensation of the processional and inclusion in the natural. Stephan Spicher was born in Basel (Switzerland) in 1950. Studied under an Italian painter B. Assenza in the Art Academy in Basel. Spicher created his first black and white works in Berlin in 1982, which later underlay several large-scale cycles. In 1986 he worked in Japan at painting panels for two- and three-part pictorial compositions. 1992 - studied and worked in an art studio on the Bali Island (Indonesia) within the framework of the Christoph Merian Foundation programme. 1993 - new series of works by Spicher - Space and Counterspace; 1996 - his first work on zinc.