In 1925 Neue Sachlichkeit, the legendary exhibition that gave its name to an entire art movement, was held in Mannheim. Paying homage to this era, the Kunst Museum Winterthur presents an exhibition that brings together three diverse yet kindred artists who all have close connections to Neue Sachlichkeit: Niklaus Stoecklin, Liselotte Moser, and Louisa Gagliardi. The subtitle refers to Theodore Adorno’s important book Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, written in exile in the United States, in which he examines the conditions of being a human being in the twentieth century, which is quite similar to the way the three artists each do in the exhibition.

Niklaus Stoecklin (1896–1982), an artist from Basel, was one of the pioneers of Neue Sachlichkeit in Switzerland and the only non-German artist who participated in the 1925 exhibition in Mannheim. Today he is one of the most famous Swiss artists of the twentieth century. Liselotte Moser (1906–1983), a painter from Lucerne who was born ten years after Stoecklin, still remains to be discovered. At the age of twenty-one, she immigrated to the United States, where she most of her life. Her painting is oriented on the visual language of Neue Sachlichkeit and American Realism; she was influenced by modern life in Detroit as much as she was from her inner searching and questioning. Her work was shown in Europe for the first time at the Nidwaldner Museum a few years ago. The exhibition in Winterthur is the first major show to feature her work in an art museum, and many of the works have never been presented in public.

The youngest artist in the exhibition is a real discovery. Louisa Gagliardi (b. 1989), from the canton of Valais and based in Zurich, is an up-and-coming Swiss artist. Her style follows the tradition of figurative painting influenced by Félix Vallotton and Neue Sachlichkeit. Her austere and reserved yet spectacular works enhance the historical focus of the exhibition and link historical dialogue with the here and now.

Curated by Andrea Lutz and David Schmidhauser