STAMPA.- KulturGasthaus Pontisella in Stampa is presenting The Art of Aging, an exhibition that brings together photography, music, painting and film in a thoughtful reflection on aging, memory and the passage of time. The exhibition, featuring works by photographer Karsten Thormaehlen, composer and painter Alfons K. Zwicker, and filmmaker Sonja Bertucci, opens on Sunday, June 14, at 7:30 p.m. and remains on view through August 8, 2026.
Presented as part of Pontisella’s cultural program, the exhibition offers an intimate encounter between three artistic voices whose works approach aging not as decline, but as a space of dignity, experience and quiet intensity. Art historian Dr. Martina Eberspächer will introduce the exhibition.
At the center of the show are two important bodies of work by Karsten Thormaehlen: his internationally recognized portraits of centenarians and a 2020 series of portraits of Swiss personalities. Several of these images were later included in Young at Heart, published in 2022 by Steidl Verlag in Göttingen. Together, the works reveal Thormaehlen’s distinctive photographic language — restrained, attentive and deeply respectful of the people he portrays.
Thormaehlen avoids theatrical staging. Instead, he photographs his subjects in spaces that feel true to them, sometimes against a simple neutral background, sometimes in carefully chosen surroundings that speak quietly of their lives. Working only with soft natural daylight, he allows each face to emerge without distraction. The result is a group of portraits in which age is not hidden or softened, but allowed to speak with clarity and grace.
The exhibition also includes the work of Swiss composer, pianist and painter Alfons K. Zwicker, born in St. Gallen in 1952. Zwicker, who received the Cultural Prize of the St. Gallen Cultural Foundation, has long explored existential themes through music and visual art. His operas, including Death and the Maiden, premiered in Dresden in 2010, often focus on resistance, vulnerability and the human condition.
In his concept Anatomy of Sound, Zwicker brings composition, drawing, painting and performance into close conversation. For him, music often begins as an image: before composing, he draws. The gesture becomes a way of imagining sound before it takes musical form.
A third perspective is offered through The Diamond Couple, the award-winning 2022 feature film by French-American director and film scholar Sonja Bertucci, Associate Professor at the University of Richmond. The 80-minute film follows Betty and Morrie Markoff, both over 100 years old, as they move through their memories and reflect on love, aging and the enduring force of shared experience.
The film received the Special Jury Prize for Inspirational Filmmaking at the Arizona International Film Festival and has since been screened at numerous international festivals. Within the context of the Pontisella exhibition, it adds a cinematic meditation on longevity, intimacy and the emotional architecture of memory.
Presented in parallel with the 4th Biennale Bregaglia, The Art of Aging echoes the Biennale’s guiding theme, Transito, or transition. Here, transition is understood in its most human form: the passage between generations, the persistence of memory, and the many stages through which a life takes shape.
The exhibition also invites visitors to consider aging beyond the familiar clichés. Through photography, music, painting and film, Pontisella creates a space for attention — a place where older lives are not reduced to biography, but seen as complex, vivid and fully present.
Karsten Thormaehlen worked for more than two decades as an independent photographer for international clients in portraiture, architecture and still life before turning increasingly toward fine art photography. His sustained engagement with aging began in 2006 and became a defining focus of his practice. His portraits of centenarians and active seniors are marked by a reduced, documentary clarity that gives his sitters room to inhabit the image on their own terms.
His work has been shown in more than 80 exhibitions worldwide, including at the National Portrait Gallery in London, where he was featured in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize in 2011 and 2016, as well as at Pratt Manhattan Gallery in New York and Toranomon Hills Tower in Tokyo. His photographs have received numerous distinctions, including awards from ADC, D&AD, the Lucie Awards and Cannes Lions, as well as multiple Portrait of Humanity honors and, most recently, Portrait of Britain.
Thormaehlen’s series Silver Heroes inspired the World Health Organization in 2012 to launch its first global campaign against age discrimination. His work has been featured in publications including Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, GEO, Stern, The Guardian, Harvard Business Review, The Japan Times and Kinfolk. His latest book, 100 Jahre Lebensglück, was published by Knesebeck in 2025.
During the exhibition, the Pontisella’s Butéga and the Schuler Wega bookshop in St. Moritz will offer a selection of available and out-of-print titles from Thormaehlen’s photographic work.
KulturGasthaus Pontisella is itself a place shaped by memory and continuity. The late Neoclassical palazzo was built in 1849 by Maria and Giovanni Pontisella-Lutscher as a summer house and remained in the family for generations. Since 2018, Daniel Erne has run the house as a bed and breakfast and cultural venue, hosting exhibitions, concerts and readings in its vaulted cellar and barn.
Located on the old valley road that has long connected Italy and Switzerland, Pontisella offers a fitting setting for an exhibition about transition. In The Art of Aging, the house becomes a meeting point for images, sounds and stories that ask viewers to look again at what it means to grow older — and to recognize the beauty, fragility and strength that time leaves behind.
