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• Aeschlimann Heinz
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• Stirnimann Franz
• Thorarinsdottir Steinunn
• von Habsburg Gabriela
• "In the Shadow of the Alps"

«...Die Motive der Eisenplastiken sind wie jene der Bilder geprägt von einer beunruhigenden Dimension. Eigenwillig und nachdrücklich wird uns das Drama der menschlichen Existenz vor Augen geführt...»

Franz Stirnimann war an entrepreneur, a painter, a sculptor working in iron. The artist displayed the paintings and sculptures that he created during a periode of 60 years in his studios in Olten and Basel seldom or not at all, and so Sti, as the artist signed his works, has remained unknown. Stirnimann creates a vivid and haunting world full of vague yearning and loneliness. Various anthropomorphous elements make up the protagonists of his paintings.

Placed in empty landscapes or in front of hard, shadowless buildings, the figures cannot find a way to each other, and they seem oddly foreign and isolated. In the abstract compositions, in which the handling of the surface of the material is the actual subject, the atmosphere is somewhat more cheerful. Using a viscous filling compound, the artist structures the surfaces; sand, gravel, or rocks are mixed into many of the backgrounds and then he configures them to a multitude of variations. He uses threads of material to form a dense and delicate meshwork and accents certain parts of the work with colour. Fantasy figures separate from some of these fragile textures, figures that can be interpreted as ciphers of existence, as signs of hope and joie de vivre, but also of menace, loneliness and pain. But the painter Franz Stirnimann was also a sculptor working in iron who had mastered the dialogue between the genres. In the abstract composition “Composition 62”, 1969 or in the larger-than-life couple “Totem” 1969 that is constructed from flat metal plates and with edges carved in relief, we encounter the artist’s characteristic subjects, both sculptures are installed in the sculptureparc. We also encounter the wounded figures with their thorns and spikes that are aimed inwardly and their thin legs that keep them in a precarious balance in the fetish figures that the artist has composed from hundreds of hand-forged nails, displayed in the artpavillon-st-urban. The motifs of the iron sculptures, just as those of the paintings, are characterised by a certain disquieting dimension.
Kathrin Frauenfelder, art historian, Zürich, Switzerland