Otto Bachmann (1915-1996) - unbekannt

Otto Bachmann (1915–1996) was born in Lucerne into a bourgeois yet rather unconventional parental home, completed an apprenticeship as a graphic designer, and found at the local School of Applied Arts a teacher, Max von Moos, who early recognized and fostered his talent.

In his day job as a graphic designer at a Zurich advertising agency, he never quite could take to it and, as a consequence, traveled for three years with a small circus, crisscrossing Europe. It was a kind of educational journey, and this atmospherically especially dense world has permanently shaped his artistic work.

His work is permeated by a (personal) view of a loner – he belonged to no painting school or artist group. He would most closely be classified as part of the Fantastic Realism from Vienna.

Whoever talks about painter Otto Bachmann must at the same moment also talk about the draftsman with the same name. His breakthrough as an artist occurred as an illustrator with twelve large panels for Goethe’s Faust, published in 1943 by Conzett and Huber in Zurich. Later he repeatedly enriched and complemented significant works from world literature with his pencil, sanguine, and lithographic drawings. In addition to these illustrations, he sat daily at his easel, first in Zurich, from 1945 in Ascona, where he also received the “Premio Cultura” from the municipality. Gradually he was able to equip more and more exhibitions and museums with his pictures, first in Paris, then in the USA and especially successful in Germany.

Through Otto Bachmann’s work, themes run that occupied him throughout his entire career: stage, circus and carnival scenes, depictions of women and nudes, richly populated compositions from mythology and religion as well as motifs from everyday life. Landscapes, still lifes, self-portraits and men are almost entirely absent from his oeuvre. He was fascinated by the transformation of people through masks and costumes – the identity change, so to speak, that takes place thereby. Masquerade not as a game of hide-and-seek, but as a decoding of the true conditions. Deeply conceived pictures of stage, circus and carnival thus form the motifs to which one still recalls with intensity today.