Peter Somm

Peter Somm (born 1940 in Sulgen, Switzerland, died 2023 in Berne, Switzerland) began to paint when he was young. His early works were predominantly abstract and were inspired by the pictorial worlds of Paul Klee and Johannes Itten. He was fundamentally self-taught, and he worked as an anesthesiologist until 1999. After he became encouraged by one of his paintings being shown in the annual exhibition of Zurich artists in 1969, he began to reduce his pictorial means even more, developing an oeuvre of paintings that oscillated between a geometric-concrete approach and a growing concentration on the experience of pure color and light effects.
In terms of form, Somm’s artistic practice was based on series, or rather variations of themes. This resulted in the development of many series of works, some of which were quite extensive: grisailles with orthogonal structures (1969–1970), colored rectangular compositions (1970–1971), flat or linear rotations (1971–1976), arc and line pictures (1973–1975), horizontally condensed landscape formats or horizons (1983–2012), concentric circular formations (1995–2011), cross paintings (1993–1995), and finally his so-called yin and yang pictures (2001–2013), which were diptych-style paintings with complementary principles of design.
All of his works created since 1970 shared a chromatics that consisted of slender units. Somm used these to distance himself not only from the relational understanding of pictures of the Zurich Concretists, but also from an undifferentiated and seamless color gradient he regarded as too diffuse. As he stressed many times – most prominently in the catalog for his exhibition in the Museum zu Allerheiligen in Schaffhausen in 1984 – his main focus was not on flatness, but rather on the effect of depth. In other words, with Somm’s “structural principle of a continuous series of color shades in layered levels” in mind, his goal was to suggest “vastness, infinity, and transcendence.” His choice of colors also adhered to this idea; they often had a “cosmic” nature, while their vibration and fluctuation were somewhat reminiscent of Victor Vasarely’s Op Art, especially his late “universal structures.”

Astrid Näff
revised in 2025