MARTIN DISLER

Driven by an incessant creativity, the self-taught artist worked on his drawings, paintings, prints and sculptures. Time and time again in his works he swept aside conventions, for instance in the monumental 140 x 4.5 meter painting Die Umgebung der Liebe (The Surroundings of Love), which was created in 1981 for the Stuttgarter Kunstverein. It was purchased by the Gottfried Keller Foundation in 2006 and has since attained the status of a Swiss cultural treasure of national significance.

A great hunger for life permeates Disler’s entire oeuvre, as do moments of an anticipation of death. Both form Martin Disler’s illusion-free vision of the condition humaine. Some of his pictures are shaped by eruptive gestures, others use movements that are gentle and controlled. Shaped by mysteriously oppressive motifs, the artist directly expresses emotions and a sense of body on the canvas. An almost intoxifying restlessness and the obsessive urge to create result in a deliberate overburdening of the artist and his audience with an opulent flood of works. Martin Disler wants the pictures to remain open; the viewer is to be encircled and devoured by the painting, ultimately sinking into it.

In addition to his artistic output, Martin Disler also wrote deeply evocative literary texts. He provided texts for over a dozen artist books. In 1980, he published the novel Bilder vom Maler (Pictures of the painter). In 2014, the book Die Versuchung des Malers (The painter’s temptation) was published posthumously. In his paintings and drawings, Disler frequently references literary texts, for instance in the over 300 watercolours created in the latter part of his life which have as their subject the poems of Fernando Pessoa, many of which engage with the topic of death.

The artist has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States, and is represented in the permanent collections of a large number of museums and public galleries, including MoMA New York, Tate Gallery London, Kunstmuseum Basel, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museum Folkwang Essen, Museum moderner Kunst Wien, Kunstmuseum Zürich, Musée des Arts et Histoire Genève to name but a few.

Martin Disler was a restless wanderer; he lived in New York, in Zurich, Amsterdam, Les Planchettes and in Lugano. He died aged only 47 in 1996 after suffering a stroke.

The Buchmann Galerie is representing the estate of Martin Disler since 2013.

Courtesy Buchmann Galerie