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Concept
Jürg Kreienbühl
Summary
Jürg Kreienbühl (August 12, 1932, Basel – October 30, 2007, Cormeilles-en-Parisis) was a Swiss and French painter.
After his high school graduation, Jürg Kreienbühl hesitated between pursuing scientific or artistic studies and finally completed an apprenticeship as a house painter in Basel. Earning a scholarship from his city, he traveled to Paris in 1956 to work and to make a living from his painting.
He first settled in Colombes where he painted rubbish tips, cemeteries and decomposing bodies of animals. Two years later, he ended up to move to the slum area of Bezons near Paris in an old wheelless bus. There he lived in difficult conditions among homeless, gypsies and North Africans who became his friends and models. Four years later, he left the slum to settle in an apartment near Argenteuil. The sales of some paintings enabled him to buy a "caravan-studio" and to keep on describing from nature, during more than a decade, the life in the slums and its population : social outcasts, prostitutes, vagrants and disabled people. In 1973, a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at Kunsthaus Museum in Aarau.
In the 1970s, Jürg Kreienbühl started to work on new subjects and to practice again etching and lithography that he could work in his home in Cormeilles-en-Parisis. In 1974, he made his first painting in the Jardin des plantes, “Hommage à Cuvier”. One year later, he found by accident a former factory of unsold terra cotta saints for churches in Vendeuvre-sur-Barse: he painted there a series a terra cotta figures lying on dusty grounds. He also spent a lot of time in Le Havre where he painted industrial pollution and the France liner which had to be demolished.
In 1982, Jürg Kreienbühl was invited to visit the Gallery of Zoology (now Gallery of Evolution) of the French National Museum of Natural History, in Paris. Because of disrepair reasons, the gallery was closed since 1965 and was no longer accessible to public. Fascinated by the damaged replica of animals and the scientific heritage of this place, he worked in the museum during three years where he realized about 60 paintings.
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