Schwitters:
On the Fringes of the Avant-Garde

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) is one of the most significant representatives of the international artistic avant-garde of the interwar years. He was a wilful crossover artist, who created an unmistakeable synthesis of art, design and literature in his art.

At the centre of his work was the principle of collage as an attempt to create new contexts of meaning from the contradictory everyday reality of modern life, and to counter the chaos of the world with a poetic order. 

The exhibition shows Schwitters’ multi-layered work of dadaist collages and his reconstructed walk-through ‘Merzbau’ in Hanover to naturalistic portraits and landscape paintings. It illuminates his creative resilience in exile and his role as an independent artist and author between the different trends of modern art. With Schwitters: On the Fringes of the Avant-Garde the Zentrum Paul Klee is showing the first comprehensive exhibition on Kurt Schwitters in Switzerland for twenty years. 

Curator: Martin Waldmeier
Curatorial assistant: Josephine Rechberg