LUCERNE.- Sonja Sekula (1918-1963) was one of the few Swiss artists to be successful in New York. The exhibition Sonja Sekula, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock & Friends situates her among her circle of friends in that focal point of new artistic departures.
Sonja Sekula, born in Lucerne in 1918, had the best prerequisites: a talent for art and literature, a good education and interesting circles in which she socialised. Her successes in the United Stated, where the Sekula family had emigrated in 1936, were disrupted as of 1939 by psychological problems and repeated hospitalizations. Although Sonja Sekula had long since had an American passport, she was forced to return to Switzerland in 1953 for financial reasons. Here, however, her work was rejected as being ‘too American’. As a homosexual woman, she suffered greatly from loneliness and under Swiss narrow-mindedness. She committed suicide in 1963.
Sonja Sekula was one of the generation of young artists who developed their work at the very heart of the established avant-gardes of Cubism, Abstraction, Surrealism and the incipient Abstract Expressionism. In the 1940s, New York, with its numerous émigré artists from Europe, was the starting point and centre of an American new departure in art. The focus of this exhibition is on the development of the young Swiss artist in that pulsating metropolis and on her circle of friends there. Sekula was part of the young New York avant-garde, was in contact with the émigré Surrealists around André Breton and with the American artists Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock. She was acquainted with John Cage and Merce Cunningham and lived in the same house as them. She socialized with Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Frida Kahlo and exhibited with Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Meret Oppenheim and Louise Bourgeois. The visionary gallery-owner Betty Parson, who played an essential role in promoting the rise of American Abstract Expressionist, became her gallerist. Sonja Sekula made numerous trips to Mexico and Europe. Her interest in literature and in the culture of the Indians influenced her work, as did Surrealism. Her multifaceted paintings, drawings and collages oscillate between finely scratched lines and liberally applied wild brushstrokes, between bright transparent colours and gloomy atmospheres, between detailed forms with figurative allusions and formal constructive solutions. Sekula’s extraordinary feeling for colours is always in evidence.
The exhibition presents Sonja Sekula in the circle of artist-friends with whom she was in close contact in New York and with whom she exhibited. It also raises the questions: Why are some artists famous and others not? Who or what determines a career? What constitutes quality?
Artists in the exhibition: Robert Barrell, Louise Bourgeois, Peter Busa, Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Arshile Gorky, Balcomb Greene, Jean Hélion, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Alice Rahon Paalen, Mark Rothko, Sonja Sekula, Kurt Seligmann, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Mark Tobey, Maria Helena Viera da Silva, Tomlin Walker Tomlin, Steve Wheeler.
Curated by Fanni Fetzer, assisted by Dominik Müller and Heinz Stahlhut
