Gottfried Tritten
Gottfried Tritten, who grew up in the Bernese Oberland, attended Burgdorf grammar school from 1939 to 1943. He then studied from 1943 to 1948 at the Basel School of Applied Arts under Georg Schmidt and Walter Bodmer, where he obtained his drawing teacher’s diploma. He continued his studies from 1948 to 1951 at the universities of Basel and Bern, specializing in art history, philosophy and psychology.
During his teaching fellowship at the Thun Teachers’ College from 1950 to 1970, he began his artistic development, which was strongly influenced by the discovery of landscape and travels abroad. Three trips to Morocco between 1951 and 1957 and a trip to Greece in 1959 were particularly important.
In 1955 he moved to Oberhofen am Thunersee and in 1958 he published his first art education publication. His first exhibitions abroad took place from 1967, including Paris, Brest and Lyon, followed by Lisbon and various cities in the USA in 1970, the year in which he also met Mark Tobey.
In 1968, he spent an art education residency in the USA and Canada, where he met important action painting and pop art artists such as Richard Diebenkorn and Andy Warhol. From 1968 to 1984, he taught at the Center de Formation du Corps enseignant secondaire at the University of Bern.
In 1974 there was a retrospective of his works at the Thun Art Museum, and in 1977 he moved to Grimisuat in Valais.
In 1992 and 1993, a further retrospective of his works was held at the Helsinki Art Museum. Further solo exhibitions were presented at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Sion in 1987, at the Fondation Louis Moret in Martigny in 2003 and at the Fondation Gianadda in Martigny in 2009.
Throughout his life, Tritten was committed to the promotion of contemporary art and founded Club 57 in 1957 and Biz’Art in 1985. His achievements were recognized with various grants and cultural prizes, including the Swiss Federal Scholarship for Applied Arts in 1953 and the Thun Culture Prize in 1986. In 1985, he was also awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Bern.
Gottfried Tritten is regarded as one of the most respected Swiss pioneers of art mediation and education, who went through two important phases in his life: pedagogy and painting. His early work was dominated by the theme of man’s relationship to the landscape. He began with figurative paintings with strong elements of movement, such as landscapes, animals and figures. From 1954 to 1957, he briefly turned to geometric abstraction. From 1958 to 1967, influenced by Abstract Expressionism, there was a gradual transition to gestural, lyrical abstraction with a high degree of creative freedom, such as in his work “Aegina” from 1965.
Tritten explored the spatial effect of lines and colors, first in black and white and later in monochrome paintings. From 1969, he began to integrate interchangeable elements into his paintings and reliefs, which opened up new ways of looking at things. He created picture cycles such as “Birth of Venus” from 1973 to 1978 and “Mountain – Man – Painting” from 1977 to 1986. From the 1970s onwards, he confronted free rhythmic design with geometric elements and thus achieved a synthesis of pictorial means, including painting, collage, decollage, drawing and especially writing, as in his cycle “The Blue Mountain. Homage to Hölderlin” from 1978 to 1982.
In later years, Tritten also turned to other techniques, such as mirror reliefs, installations and stained glass. In the 1990s, he intensively explored the nature of signs and individual colors in series of works. He expressed his profound world view, which was influenced by Taoist philosophy, in works such as “Stillness and Movement. Hommage to Tao” from 1991 to 1992 and “Hommage au Bleu” from 1994.