Stephan Spicher Vita

At the age of 19 he began to study at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, but then at the age of 22 found his teacher, Beppe Assenza, in whose workshop he studied painting for over four years. Academic studies were the basis, but Assenza, born in Italy, taught pure, free painting and the study of colour.

“Assenza taught artistic, processual thinking and at the same time represented Italian aesthetics, my father taught me how to read and observe nature. For me this was an ideal combination.”

In 1978 Spicher moved back to the Maggia Valley on the southern edge of the Alps to digest his studies.

“To learn something is one thing, to forget it again, respectively to free oneself from the knowledge is another.”

Spicher decided to abandon the colour he had studied so thoroughly, to concentrate purely on black and white and to deepen the texture with the material ash, only to dissolve it again afterwards. The series of ash walls were characteristic for the 1980s.

After long spells in Paris, Berlin and the USA, Spicher was very impressed by Japan, which he visited during his exhibition in Tokyo in 1986.

“To see the individual as a whole, this aesthetic fascinated me very much and stayed with me until today.”

Spicher has visited Japan many times and has exhibited in various Japanese cities. His paintings became more and more condensed into lines. The spaces between these lines became more and more important – space and counter-space, visible and invisible line – themes that were formative for the 1990s.

In 1991 Spicher married Tatiana Semenova and in the following years built up his studio in St. Petersburg. Having already witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, Spicher now saw a Russia that was breaking free from the Soviet era and slowly opening up. His main studio was now in Basel and he was constantly commuting between the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, Basel and St. Petersburg.

Artistically the lines changed into vegetative forms: he named the following large group of works “Blossom”.

During this time Spicher was involved in an exchange project with artists from Indonesia by Urs Ramseyer, a leading ethnologist for Southeast Asia, and spent many months in studios in Java and Bali.

“In Japanese culture, in Asia in general, one feels the blossoming together with the withering. We separate the two and concentrate on the blossoming. In Asia, withering is also beautiful.”

“The blooming and fading, the elemental in nature, remains a theme which I still work on and explore in depth while painting and drawing. I am actually still in the middle of this process.”