Martin Disler

Born in 1949 in Seewen (Switzerland), Martin Disler became known to a wider audience in the late 1970s. The exhibition Invasion durch eine falsche Sprache (Invasion by a wrong language) in Kunsthalle Basel in 1980 marked his international breakthrough.

Driven by an incessant creativity, the self-taught artist worked on his drawings, paintings, prints and sculptures. Time and time again in his work he approached the limits of his own physical endurance. Not only in his 4.5 x 140 meter monumental painting Die Umgebung der Liebe (The Surroundings of Love), or in the Stream of Eros (1985), a mural for the Serpentine Gallery in London, did he put his limits to the test driving himself to the point of exhaustion, but also with the group of 66 life-size bronze sculptures Häutung und Tanz (Shedding of Skin and Dance).

A great hunger for life permeates Disler’s entire oeuvre, as does the anticipation of death. Both form Martin Disler’s illusion-free vision of the condition humaine. Some of his pictures are shaped by eruptive gestures, others use movements that are gentle and controlled. Shaped by mysteriously oppressive motifs, the artist directly expresses emotions and a sense of body on the canvas. An almost intoxifying restlessness and the obsessive urge to create result in a deliberate overburdening of the artist and his audience with an opulent flood of works. Martin Disler wants the pictures to remain open; the viewer is to be encircled and devoured by the painting, ultimately sinking into it.

Martin Disler was a restless wanderer; he lived in New York, in Zurich, Amsterdam, Les Planchettes and in Lugano. He died aged only 47 on 27 August 1996 after suffering a stroke.

The Buchmann Gallery is representing the estate of Martin Disler since 2013.

Submitted by Buchmann Galerie