Signed; Jürg Kreienbühl - Malerei der Leidenschaft / Peinture de la passion [with dedication] - 1998

First edition signed by Jürg Kreienbühl.

"For my friend Franklin whom I love, Jurg, 10/31/1998 Basel".

We attach a page of A4 format (open on its folds), on which Kreienbühl gives information to a friend allowing him to correctly hang a painting on a wall.
This document is accompanied by a small drawing by the painter to make it easier to understand.

In his realistic paintings, close to hyperrealism, Kreienbühl depicts a
friendly idiot: the man.

Born in 1932 from Basel, Jürg Kreienbühl struggled in the Parisian slums but these, in return, nourished his realism.
Unlike a flat photograph, it bears witness to a material. Which makes our attitudes palpable, touching but also devilishly aberrant...

Poverty and pollution are themes which, for most of us, remain abstract.

The writing tells the situation like a story, and the moving image only slides over the observations. The discomfort goes away quite quickly.
While the same subjects, in the paintings of Jürg Kreienbühl, impose their realism on you.
This one hits you in the face, due to the stasis of the media, but this stasis has the power of a look that has devilishly delved into the motive.

“Jürg Kreienbühl paints things,” writes Leonard Ginsburg in this work.
“Some paint them magnified, life at its peak, beauty in its fullness. Kreienbühl paints the misery of things.”

In his paintings in the large zoology gallery of the Paris Museum, Kreienbühl focused on drawing effects of light from the darkness, which, descending from the immense glass roof, almost made the large mammals shudder.
These paintings greatly influenced the decision to rehabilitate this monument and bring it back to life.

In this shambles, Kreienbühl rediscovered the fascination that things neglected by society exert on him, as well as the spirit of the 19th century, distinguished by the architecture of the place, all metal frames and glass roofs.

A 19th century whose painters he admires, who know how to combine feeling with beautiful craftsmanship.

Among the moderns, he appreciated the finesse of Vuillard and the neoclassicism of Degas, but hated Cézanne, “a poorly gifted painter and harbinger of confusion.” He feels close to Enzor and Chaïm Soutine. Like the latter, he paints distorted flesh. Rotting dead animals, rotten fruit, trash cans, tramps, slums make up his repertoire.

He himself, in the years 1958-1962, lived in an abandoned bus in a vacant lot in Bezons (near Paris), among Algerians, Poles, Gypsies and Portuguese whom he portrayed.

A humanity that he renders with warmth, but without complacency, as if sketched with the rubble itself.

“Everyone is destined to die one day, to decompose” constitutes his initial credo.

Then around the age of 40, death no longer appeared to him as an end, but as a necessary transformation.
Readings of Freud and Jung led him to consider that in this transformation, only the material forms are affected, while the spiritual form endures.

In its Swiss landscapes, almost as idyllic as in the last century, our eye is inevitably drawn to the cans of beer or cola which distort them.

Kreienbühl is not inventing anything. He paints what he sees. But unlike an ultimately flat photograph, it bears witness with a material.

By painting the liner France rusting in the inner harbor of Le Havre, fishermen throwing their hooks a stone's throw from a nuclear power plant, he paints a sympathetic idiot, but an idiot: the human being.

Jürg Kreienbühl's painting has been, since its beginnings, a brutal juxtaposition of the concepts of tradition and modernity.

From the point of view of painting techniques, the same conflict occurs: despite a pictorial technique which readily refers to 19th century painting, Kreienbühl paints most of his paintings not on canvas but on hardboard, and he does not do not use oil but acrylic paints.
He is also part of the small group of the first painters to have chosen this technique, during the 60s.

- Number of pages: 285
- Dimensions: 28.6 x 29.2 x 2.5 cm
- Binding: Hard cover with dust jacket

Condition: Like new copy, interior free of annotations and dog-eared pages. Cover with stitched corners. Dust jacket in excellent condition, unworn at the corners, with a minimal fold at the bottom.
See the pictures.
Very nice copy.

Will be delivered in a neat, sturdy and tracked package.