Camille Graeser

Camille Graeser (1892–1980) was a Swiss painter and member of the circle of Zurich Concrete artists.

He was born in Switzerland but grew up in Stuttgart, Germany where he became a furniture designer.

After studies, Camille came into contact with the work of Chagall, Kandinsky, Klee and Archipenko for the first time and made his first steps in the direction of abstract art. In 1917, he opened a studio for interior architecture, advertising graphics and product design in Stuttgart, whose reputation in the city continued to grow. The following year, in 1918, the painter held his first personal exhibition and in 1927, he was commissioned to provide the interior design of a model home in the revolutionary Weissenhof village of the Association of German Factories near Stuttgart. His woven carpets for the model home were his first art works in the direction of geometric constructivist art.

In 1933, Graeser left for Switzerland, where he dedicated himself exclusively to visual art. Starting from two-dimensional Purism, he found his way to a rigorously constructive approach, which he employed both to paintings and drawings and to reliefs and sculptures. During the period from 1947 to 1951, he produced the Loxodromic pictorial compositions, in which he demonstrated structural and formal analogies between music and art.

Since 1950, Graeser was among the most important representatives of Concrete Art in Switzerland, along with Max Bill, Verena Loewensberg and Richard Paul Lohse. In 1964, he had his first museum exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zurich. During his lifetime, the painter also took part in numerous exhibitions in Europe and the United States.