Martin Disler Malerei

The Buchmann Gallery Berlin is pleased to announce the gallery’s first show of the works of Martin Disler (1949, Seewen – 1996, Geneva).  
In cooperation with Martin Disler’s estate we will be presenting eight large- format pictures dating from the middle to the end of the 1980s.  
Born in 1949 in Seewen (Switzerland), Martin Disler became known to a wider audience in the late 1970s. The exhibition Invasion durch eine falsche Sprache (Invasion by a wrong language) in Kunsthalle Basel in 1980 marked his international breakthrough.   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 metre 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.  
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 a novel, Bilder vom Maler (Pictures of the painter). In September 2014, the book Die Versuchung des Malers (The painter's temptation) will be 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 anticipation of death permeates Disler’s entire oeuvre, as do moments of a great hunger for life. 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.  
Martin Disler was a restless wanderer; he lived in New York, in Zurich, Amsterdam, Les Planchettes and in Lugano. He died aged only 47 on 27 August 1996 after suffering a stroke.  
The Buchmann Gallery is representing the estate of Martin Disler since 2013. An exhibition of the artist’s paintings and sculptures was held last year in the Buchmann Gallery in Lugano. This present exhibition in Berlin will showcase the painter’s later works from the late 1980s.   
We are delighted that a parallel exhibition with paintings and drawings from the late 1970s is taking place simultaneously at the Gallery Mehdi Chouakri in Berlin.  
For more information about the artist and for images please contact the gallery.