Reference monograph.
The German artist Anne Loch, who lived partly in Switzerland from the 1980s onwards, challenged the conventions of representation and explored the limits of painting. In her monumental depictions of mountains, flowers, animals, and insects, she created a subtle yet persistent tension.
Published by Zentrum Paul Klee and Mousse Publishing on the occasion of the exhibition at the Bern institution, held from 18 July to 20 September 2026, the catalogue brings together more than 300 works and traces Loch's sustained engagement with painting and the gradual dissolution of her motifs.
What initially appears idyllic, or even clichéd, resists unambiguous interpretation upon closer inspection. The boundaries between figuration and abstraction, painting and drawing, reality and dream become increasingly blurred. Line, colour, and plane, along with the search for the right balance between these fundamental elements of painting, move to the foreground.
Anne Loch (1946-2014) was a German painter who for the most part conducted her artistic practice away from the public eye. As a painter, she championed a figurative visual language.
Loch studied painting in Düsseldorf in the 1970s before becoming active in the Cologne art scene, which at the time was a hub for contemporary art in the former West Germany. It was there that she exhibited alongside artists like
Rosemarie Trockel,
Jenny Holzer and
Cindy Sherman.. She seemed destined for a promising career. But in 1988, she radically withdrew, moving to Thusis in Switzerland. While living there, she quietly persevered with her creative practice and only occasionally exhibited her work, such as at the Erika and Otto Friedrich Gallery in Bern. In 2001, she returned to Germany, where she once again withdrew, largely isolating herself from the outside world and the art scene. She passed away in Bergell in 2014 following a brief illness.
In the wake of the Second World War, abstract art—such as abstract expressionism, minimal art and conceptual art—became dominant. It was not until the 1970s that painting found its way back to the "visible" world. Anne Loch plays a pioneering role in this development. In doing so, she establishes a distinctive visual language.
Her subject matter may appear trivial at first glance. But by enlarging her paintings to monumental proportions, they seem to lose all reference to their subject matter and to reality. Loch's primary interest was the act of painting itself – the exploration of colour, surface and space. Or, as Anne Loch puts it herself: "I just paint strokes and how they relate to each other."
Loch returned time and again to the same subject matter, but experimented with a vast array of techniques. Her oeuvre ranges from canvasses painted in rich, vibrant colours to sparse compositions consisting of only a few strokes. Her art invites us to conceive of painting not as a depiction of the world around us, but as its own self-contained means of seeing and experiencing.
