Museum Haus Konstruktiv is honoring Hedi Mertens (b. 1893 in Gossau, d. 1982 in Carona) in a retrospective solo exhibition. The Swiss artist made an important contribution to constructivist-concrete art with her comparatively late oeuvre, which was mostly based on systematic investigations of the square.
When Hedi Mertens began painting constructive-concrete works in 1960, she was 67 years old. This late start is surprising in that Mertens had already decided to complete a classical art education in Switzerland and Germany in 1912. After some early expressionist paintings, however, she stopped painting in the 1930s - but her interest in art remained. As an astute observer of the contemporary scene, she was in active contact with people with an affinity for art and culture who came and went with her and her husband Walter Mertens at the Bünishof in Feldmeilen between 1930 and 1944.
In addition to her preoccupation with spiritual questions - Mertens would live in an ashram in India in 1938/39 - it was her encounters with the constructively concrete artists Leo Leuppi and Richard Paul Lohse that had a lasting influence on her understanding of art. She maintained close contact with Lohse in particular. She would repeatedly discuss "problems of constructive formulations" with him. "I paint pictures related to yours but only in dreams", she wrote to him in a letter in 1951.
February 8 to May 5, 2024
