Picture: 104 x 79 cm
The exhibition Movement traces the decades-long, dynamic, and ever-evolving career of Swiss photographer René Groebli — an artist who never stood still and continually tempted the new, previously unseen, without ever confining himself to one single style, genre, or technique.
Groebli’s oeuvre is so multifaceted that it cannot be understood through a few iconic images alone. It encompasses dynamic street photography full of motion blur, experiments in color and montage techniques, inventive industrial and commissioned works, as well as intimate studies of life, love, and bodily forms in black and white. If there is one constant throughout his oeuvre, it is a clearly recognizable, unquenchable thirst for new forms of expression. One of his earliest photographs – taken freehand from his bicycle over the handlebars – already reveals the artist’s early fascination with speed and stands symbolically for a career that would follow no linear path, always moving slightly ahead of prevailing formal conventions.
Groebli works and feels lyrically and intuitively. Soon after beginning his studies at the Zurich School of Applied Arts under Hans Finsler, whose teaching was rooted in the cool, static aesthetics of Neue Sachlichkeit, he quickly broke away, drawn instead to the vibrant energy of Zurich’s streets, clubs, and stages. Like a filmmaker, he seeks to make the essence of movement visible within still images, willingly sacrificing perfect sharpness, embracing elements of chance, and thereby capturing not only motion but also emotion. This subjective, free approach to photography reveals a cinematic sensibility that stands in stark contrast to the strict formalism of postwar Swiss photography.
Thus, Groebli’s 1949 photo essay Rail Magic, published when he was only 22, initially went largely unnoticed. Transforming a steam train journey from Paris to Basel into a swirling, smoke-filled, grainy celebration of speed, the series is now regarded as a brilliant precursor to subjective photography.
Equally evocative is the poetic and intimate series The Eye of Love, created in 1952 during the belated honeymoon with his wife, Rita. Initially misunderstood and dismissed as scandalous, the series has since gained international recognition for what it truly is: a tender love poem in pictures — created by an artist who observes his wife with a gentle gaze and captures the poetry of everyday gestures.
The exhibition Movement invites the viewer to experience Groebli’s photography as he lived it: as a dynamic, centrifugal force that captures movement in all its forms – physical, emotional, and artistic. It reveals an artist for whom photography was never merely a means of documenting the world, but a living, ever-changing medium – meant to move the viewer.
