Hedi Mertens
Hedi Mertens (born 1893 in Gossau, Switzerland, died 1982 in Carona) had a very unusual artistic career. Although she trained to become an artist when she was still young, first in Wilhelm Hummel’s painting class beginning in 1912, then at the Debschitz school in Munich starting in 1914, she did not begin to devote her life entirely to painting until 1960, when she was 67.
During the decades in-between, Mertens (née Eberle) lived a colorful life. In 1930, she moved to a farm estate called Bünishof in Feldmeilen together with her two children from her first marriage and her second husband, Walter Mertens. Soon after, the couple had two more children. Their home gradually became a kind of a cultural center that attracted people like Hermann Hesse, Carl Gustav Jung, and the expressionist artist Helen Dahm. Mertens became close friends with Dahm, and they traveled to India together to see Shri Meher Baba in 1938, a mystic whose teachings continue to spread to this day and who later visited the artist several times.
After Walter Mertens’ death in 1943, Hedi Mertens relocated to the Ticino canton of Switzerland in 1952, where she moved into a house in Carona together with the painter Arend Fuhrmann in 1953. In 1960, she began to fully devote herself to Concrete painting. This decision was inspired by an intense exchange of ideas with Richard Paul Lohse, her contact with Leo Leuppi, and her closeness to Fuhrmann. A lecture on the tonal system of Chinese music also provided important impulses for her work.
Within the next 20 years, she created an impressive oeuvre of about 200 artworks. These are based on the square and experiment with different systems, variations, and color relations, although intuition always plays a central role. Regardless of their differences, her series coherently relate to each other. Most of her work titles, like “Weisser Grund, schwarz, drei rote Quadrate um blaue Mitte” (White Ground, Black, Three Red Squares Around a Blue Middle) or the work “Komposition mit starkem Mittelquadrat” (Composition with a Strong Square in the Middle), give us direct insight into her working method. The painting “Ohne Titel” (Untitled) from 1972, which is part of our collection, is an exception in this regard, but it can still be ascribed to one of Mertens’ series of works in which she arranges squares of different sizes into a spiral to introduce the themes of movement and rhythm into the compositional structure. Having intuitively explored these playful systems in these works, in her last paintings, Mertens lets the squares float on a white ground, creating a language of transcendence through light hues and minimal forms.
Muriel Pérez
During the decades in-between, Mertens (née Eberle) lived a colorful life. In 1930, she moved to a farm estate called Bünishof in Feldmeilen together with her two children from her first marriage and her second husband, Walter Mertens. Soon after, the couple had two more children. Their home gradually became a kind of a cultural center that attracted people like Hermann Hesse, Carl Gustav Jung, and the expressionist artist Helen Dahm. Mertens became close friends with Dahm, and they traveled to India together to see Shri Meher Baba in 1938, a mystic whose teachings continue to spread to this day and who later visited the artist several times.
After Walter Mertens’ death in 1943, Hedi Mertens relocated to the Ticino canton of Switzerland in 1952, where she moved into a house in Carona together with the painter Arend Fuhrmann in 1953. In 1960, she began to fully devote herself to Concrete painting. This decision was inspired by an intense exchange of ideas with Richard Paul Lohse, her contact with Leo Leuppi, and her closeness to Fuhrmann. A lecture on the tonal system of Chinese music also provided important impulses for her work.
Within the next 20 years, she created an impressive oeuvre of about 200 artworks. These are based on the square and experiment with different systems, variations, and color relations, although intuition always plays a central role. Regardless of their differences, her series coherently relate to each other. Most of her work titles, like “Weisser Grund, schwarz, drei rote Quadrate um blaue Mitte” (White Ground, Black, Three Red Squares Around a Blue Middle) or the work “Komposition mit starkem Mittelquadrat” (Composition with a Strong Square in the Middle), give us direct insight into her working method. The painting “Ohne Titel” (Untitled) from 1972, which is part of our collection, is an exception in this regard, but it can still be ascribed to one of Mertens’ series of works in which she arranges squares of different sizes into a spiral to introduce the themes of movement and rhythm into the compositional structure. Having intuitively explored these playful systems in these works, in her last paintings, Mertens lets the squares float on a white ground, creating a language of transcendence through light hues and minimal forms.
Muriel Pérez
Works by Hedi Mertens
