Hedi Mertens

Museum Haus Konstruktiv is honoring Hedi Mertens (b. 1893 in Gossau, SG, d. 1982 in Carona, TI) in a retrospective solo exhibition. This Swiss artist made an important contribution to constructivist-concrete art with her oeuvre, which began comparatively late and was mostly based on systematic studies of the square.

8.2.–5.5.2024
curated by Evelyne Bucher

When Hedi Mertens began painting constructivist-concrete works in 1960, she was 67 years old. This late start is surprising, given that Mertens had opted for a classical art education in Switzerland and Germany back in 1912. After producing some early expressionist pictures, she stopped painting in the 1930s, but her interest in art remained. As an astute observer of the contemporary scene, she was in a lively exchange with the art-and-culture enthusiasts who passed through Bünishof, the house in Feldmeilen that she and her husband Walter Mertens called home, between 1930 and 1944. Alongside her exploration of spiritual matters (in 1938/39, Mertens went to India and stayed in an ashram), her encounters with the constructivist-concrete artists Leo Leuppi and Richard Paul Lohse had a lasting influence on her understanding of art. She maintained close contact with Lohse in particular, frequently discussing “problems regarding constructivist formulations” with him. “I paint pictures that are akin to yours, but only in my dreams,” she wrote in a 1951 letter to Lohse.

Another nine years passed before Mertens resumed her artistic work. By then, she was living in the Ticino village of Carona, where she shared accommodation with the considerably younger Arend Fuhrmann (b. 1918 in Hamburg, d. 1984 in Carona). Inspired by a lecture on Chinese music, she engaged with geometric abstraction and, in less than two decades, created an impressively mature oeuvre comprising around 200 works, in which the square form appears in very different variations and with a wide range of color gradations.

Haus Konstruktiv has already exhibited Hedi Mertens, in the 1989 group show Five Female Painters from One Generation: Gisela Andersch, Vera Haller, Jenny Losinger-Ferri, Hedi Mertens, Elsy Wiskemann. Now, around 25 years later, we are dedicating a retrospective to her alone, which begins in the last room on the fifth floor and ends with works from her final creative period on the fourth floor.

Hedi Mertens’s oeuvre is characterized by the duality of logic and intuition. Rational strictness manifests itself primarily in her consistent use of the square, be it as the painting’s defining format (sometimes standing on its corner or multiplied in a landscape format) or as a basic module with which the artist systematically organizes her pictures by means of grids, division, multiplication, mirroring and other geometric operations. This rational approach is contrasted with free intuitive use of color, which clearly sets Mertens apart from her colleagues in the Zurich Concretists’ milieu. Without following any inherent color-determining logic, Mertens used primary colors, black, white, delicate pastel shades and brightly vibrant mixed colors in various nuances, which she applied to the canvas in a sometimes opaque, sometimes translucent, sometimes cloudy and often homogeneous manner. This led to color contrasts and color combinations that are quite unconventional in the context of constructivist-concrete art.

Realized in cooperation with Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana (MASI), this exhibition was presented in a slightly different way at Palazzo Reali in Lugano from April to October 2023. The collaboration resulted in the catalog Hedi Mertens: La logica dell’intuizione / Logik der Intuition, published by Scheidegger & Spiess / Edizioni Casagrande, featuring texts (in German and Italian) by Francesca Benini, Evelyne Bucher and Medea Hoch, as well as numerous color reproductions of the artworks.