Peter Stämpfli (1937-2026) - La Bouche

Peter Stämpfli — La Bouche (1971)
Watercolour and collage on paper. A unique work, 1971. [Sheet: 32 × 32 cm]
Presented in a black frame with passepartout.
Condition: mint.

Provenance: Edition Panderma (Carl Laszlo), Basel; Galrie von Bartha, Basel.

Peter Stämpfli (1937 Deisswil, Switzerland – 2026 Paris) was one of the leading Swiss figures of Pop art. After training in Biel and Bern he moved to Paris in 1959, settling in a studio at the Bateau-Lavoir, and at the 1963 Paris Biennale he emerged as one of the few European artists to give an immediate, independent answer to American and British Pop. One operation ran through his entire career: he isolated a single everyday motif on a bare white ground, removed it from its context, and rendered it with cool, magnified precision. From the mid-1960s that motif was the automobile; from 1969–70 he narrowed it to the tyre tread — the subject that became his signature and through which he reworked the language of geometric abstraction.

La Bouche — "the mouth" — dates from 1971, exactly at that threshold. It applies the same procedure to a single human fragment: the motif lifted out, set against the void of the page, and held in close, deliberate focus.

Stämpfli represented Switzerland at the 1970 Venice Biennale, and his work entered major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. A foundation dedicated to his work was later established with his wife, Anna Maria, in Sitges.