Hans Krüsi

Hans Krüsi ( born April 15, 1920 in Zurich, † September 9, 1995 in St. Gallen) was a Swiss painter and a city known Zurich original. He is an important representative of the Art Brut.

Life

Krüsi was an illegitimate child of Emma Krüsi and grew only with foster parents in memory, then in the orphanage in the town of Appenzell on. With a poor education and a few years working as a laborer and gardener's assistant in various parts of Switzerland, he moved in 1947 to St. Gallen and the end of 1948 started his own business. He went early in the morning from St. Gallen to Zurich's Bahnhofstrasse and selling flowers that he had picked himself either in the Alps or bought in wholesale. The precarious living conditions and his rather weak constitution led him in the fall of 1968 to around six -month rest cure on the Walenstadtberg.

At age 16, he began to photograph in 1975, he also began to paint. He painted mainly on wrapping paper, cardboard or napkins, the documents to him anywhere and freely available. His favorite motifs - all taken from his immediate life world - were animals, especially cows. Since the mid- seventies Krüsi sold on his Zurich Florist also create your own drawings and paintings. He was so successful that he soon earned more money with his pictures than with his flowers. When he died from emphysema in September 1995, he had become a rich man.

Beginning of 1981, the Buchmann Galerie in St. Gallen for the first time his paintings, then, in the same year, the gallery Anton Meier in Geneva. Thus, the attention of the Swiss press and the art scene was awakened to the special union geek and original self-taught artist. Krüsi could give up his flower stall soon and devote himself to artistic creation in the sequence. 1991, so far the only monograph was published two essays on the life and work as well as 91 color plates.

Krüsis been to a large part not yet sifted estate next to some 4,000 paintings and drawings includes a large amount of photographs, negatives, Polaroids and edited by overpainting photographs and tape recordings and sound collages, to a number of prose texts and poems, together with an immense amount of other raw materials. The Kunstmuseum Thurgau, Charterhouse, where his estate is administered, held on 8 April to 7 October 2001, entitled Krüsi, Hans: A Nothing can be something ... a first work overview.

On September 19, 2009, one of three put together by Michael Stauffer from the estate of Hans Krüsis radio plays with the title I can not be sent in the Germany radio without donkey.