Encountering Peter Schweri’s early works feels like pure discovery: A scattering of torn pages, inked and painted so beautifully, fragile impressions of mental states, encounters, dreams perhaps. ‘Mental masks’ abound in Schweri’s 60’s and 70’s work – a period the artist was involved in the art and literary scene that developed in the village of Carona, Ticino. Brick and mortar humanoid figures, neurotic, trippy eyed mickeys, lizards in love, the indescribable, the flash in the pan, the diamond in the rough. None of this is a character, it’s all surface, pages ready to be (figuratively) torn, shaped, cut and worn like a mask. The eye area is seldomly depicted – perhaps pointing to his later loss of eyesight. Drawings you feel over and under your skin. Other decades brought forth different ways of working in him: concrete geometries, pioneering software art, performance, music... other states of mind, other stories to unravel. Marco Antonini

Peter Schweri (1939 – 2016) was a Swiss artist, painter, illustrator, composer and computer art pioneer. First working in film and graphic design, he later became part of the artist commune in Carona (Ticino), where he lived alongside David Weiss and Anton Bruhin, producing a host of fascinatingly idiosyncratic drawings. During the 1980’s he became known for his finely executed hard-edge paintings, later turning into digital compositions, and is today also considered a representative of the Zürich concrete-constructive movement. Recent exhibitions include «Keine Zeit – Kunst aus Zürich», Helmhaus Zürich, 2017; «CARONA» Weiss Falk, Basel 2018, “Group Exhibition” at Fabbrica Culturale Baviera, Giornico, 2021.

In Collaboration with suns.works

On Occasion of the Exhibition Mental Mask
by Peter Schweri & Grégory Sugnaux
Spring 2023 at suns.works in Zurich

Special thanks to the Estate of Peter Schweri / Stella Diess