BERN.- Anne Loch’s (1946–2014) career began in the 1980s amid the Cologne art scene alongside figures such as Rosemarie Trockel, Jenny Holzer and Cindy Sherman. Then the German artist broke radically with the art world and lived very reclusively in Switzerland. This, however, did not involve an interruption of her artistic work: Anne Loch’s œuvre comprises some 1400 works. From 18 July to 20 September 2026, the Zentrum Paul Klee is dedicating to this distinctive painter only the second major solo exhibition in Switzerland, following the one held at the Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur in 2017. Around 80 works, some on a monumental scale, invite visitors to discover Anne Loch’s unmistakeable body of work.

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A yellow flower on a blue ground, almost two metres high. A flock of sheep stretching across more than 3.5 metres. A moth on a canvas nearly one metre high. The interior of a peony blossom or the head of a raven, enlarged to over two metres. Many of Anne Loch’s works are of an overwhelming format. It is not only the size of the individual works that is monumental, but also the scope of the œuvre as a whole: the artist has produced some 1400 paintings as well as numerous works on paper and photographic works throughout a career lasting just forty years. Her extensive estate is kept in Bern.

From the Cologne art scene to the Swiss mountains

The start of Anne Loch’s career in the 1980s was highly promising. Early on, she was represented by the prestigious Monika Sprüth Gallery, along with Rosemarie Trockel, Jenny Holzer and Cindy Sherman, and was able to show her works to the public in numerous exhibitions. With her paintings of nature and landscapes, she assumed an extremely independent position in the context of the revival of figurative painting in Germany, and distinguished herself from the gestural and neo-expressionist works of her contemporaries.





A successful artistic career seemed likely, but then, in 1988, Anne Loch made a radical break and withdrew to Thusis in the Swiss Canton of the Grisons. Her retreat was not only geographical but also social: She broke off her contacts with Cologne, and even in Switzerland she maintained regular contact with only a very few people. She did not, however, interrupt her artistic activity: Loch went on working tirelessly in private and created an extensive œuvre which, besides monumental paintings, also includes drawings, photographs, text and video works. She only showed her works occasionally, for example at the Erika and Otto Friedrich Gallery in Bern.

Between the poles of kitsch and art

With a few exceptions, Anne Loch painted nothing but landscapes, flowers and animals: subjects among the most conventional and clichéd in the history of visual art. Human beings remained largely excluded, along with any claim to anchorage in the social present or a reference to contemporary world events. She herself wrote in her diary:

‘But it is comforting for me to know that I do not paint an inventory, do not paint social criticism, do not paint utopia, not a critique of society, not a sociological study [...]. I simply paint lines and their relationship to one another.’ --- Anne Loch, audio diary, cassette 13 (unpublished)

Even though Loch’s paintings seem close to kitsch at first glance, her painting is serious and unironic. Through the monumental enlargement of her motifs, the depicted subjects lose their reference to reality. The works do not emanate spontaneity, but the most precise planning and construction: thanks to her huge photographic estate, it is possible to trace that Anne Loch’s works were preceded by preparatory photographic work, with all compositional decisions already made before the first brushstroke was applied to the canvas. The paintings look unreal – alien, in fact – and their cool artificiality creates a sense of detachment. From a distance, the colours appear saturated, and the motifs are clearly recognisable. But the closer one gets, the more the motif dissolves and one becomes absorbed in the canvas, which in places gleams through the thinly applied paint.

Painting for painting’s sake

One is tempted to seek hidden meanings and stories in the monumental motifs. But Loch’s artistic stance is manifested not in what she paints, but in the way she paints it.

‘I have no inner stories to tell, nothing wants to come out of me, assume form. I get this impulse from my motifs. Let’s say, the way I need the gaze of a man to feel like kissing. If it happens, it’s a different thing, it becomes natural – like painting. In painting there is no longer a motif.’ -- Anne Loch: «Hinterrhein / Indifferent», in: Anne Loch. der Soldat und die Gärtnerin, eds. André Born and Anne Loch, Bern, 2003.

Anne Loch was primarily interested in painting as such, and in the engagement with colour, surface and space. In the process, the motifs became interchangeable. Thus, Loch reveals herself as an artist of her time, putting pictorial worlds to the test. She played with the conventions of representation, enlarged her photographic motifs to a monumental scale and probed the boundaries of representation. The everyday motif loses any relation to its real counterpart, and the works blur the familiar boundaries between figuration and abstraction, painting and drawing, reality and dream.

In this way, painting becomes perceptible as an autonomous form of seeing and experiencing, rather than just as a mere depiction of the world. For this reason, the interest in Anne Loch’s work lies not least in the fact that her painting does not so much give answers as ask questions: about the status of the image, the reliability of seeing and an artistic attitude that deliberately avoids the establishment of meaning.

The Estate of Anne Loch

The few people with whom Anne Loch remained in contact after her return to Switzerland and later include André Born and Peter Spahr. They were the ones who, after she was diagnosed with cancer, arranged for accommodation and care until her death. It is probably for this reason that Anne Loch left her entire work to André Born, which is why the artist’s estate is today in Bern.