The Graphische Sammlung ETH Zurich holds around 4,000 drawings by Swiss artists from the 18th and 19th centuries. These include compositional sketches, preparatory studies, and design drawings for printmaking to sophisticated watercolours and gouaches with a painterly quality, as well as meticulous scientific illustrations relating to Alpine research and natural history.

Thanks to the generous support given by the Stiftung Familie Fehlmann in Winterthur to the research project ‘Swiss Drawings’—a collaboration between the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich and the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich—this unique collection is currently the focus of scholarly research, cataloguing, and digitisation. The project will culminate in the exhibition Glaciers and Rapids, which will coincide with a conference and an accompanying publication on Swiss drawings.

The exhibition focuses on demonstrating how a visual image of Switzerland was created around 1800, both at home and abroad, that continues to resonate to this day. The exhibition aims to do justice to the complexity of the collection, while also highlighting the artistic quality of Swiss drawing. In doing so, it addresses a gap in research on art production in Switzerland.

Curatorial Team: Susanne Pollack and Linda Vogel

Printmaking played an important part in the oeuvre of Hugo Suter (1943–2013). His work is notable for its whimsical yet thoughtful approach to topics and motifs alike. He mostly found inspiration in his immediate surroundings – the view out of a window, the lake close to his house, a chance find in a newspaper. At the same time his prints are strikingly precise examples of high-quality workmanship. Suter was specially interested in working with glass, which explains why many of his prints are in fact hyalographs (glass prints). Glass allowed him to realise his often complex, multi-layered ideas to his own satisfaction.

In a research project launched by the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich together with the Hugo und Mariann Suter Stiftung, Suter’s prints are being scientifically examined, recorded and made accessible in a digital catalogue raison-né. Concurrently with the publication of the catalogue rai-sonné, the exhibition will provide the public with a wider, multi-media gateway into Suter’s work: in addition to prints, the exhibits will also include photographs, drawings and three-dimensional objects, which will in turn highlight the interconnections and internal ramifications of his art. The exhibition will also be accompanied by a (hard-copy) book of essays that will explore in depth Suter’s special approach to printmaking.

Curatorial Team: Alexandra Barcal, keeper of 20th and 21st century works; Tim Oechslin, project assistant

People with physical or cognitive impairments have always been part of society, yet their needs and stories tend to be heard only in retrospect — if at all. Blindness, missing limbs and deafness have also consistently been subjects that artists have returned to throughout the centuries. Even if the depictions do not play a central role in art, they have always been present. They are inscribed in portrayals of pain and sanctity, in caricatures and anatomical studies, in portraits and allegorical compositions.

The exhibition approaches disability not as a medical category, but as a cultural, social, and aesthetic concept. A transhistorical view of the collection pursues the thesis that the motif of “disability” has been distancing itself increasingly, particularly in recent years, from a conventional pictorial tradition.

The works gathered in the exhibition may be read as documents of a history of seeing: they reveal how people with disabilities have been perceived, marginalised and represented. The exhibition aims to create visibility and invite visitors to question social norms. With this exhibition, the Graphische Sammlung opens a space for reflection. It does not aim to provide a definitive answer, but rather to encourage further reflection – about disability, about history, and about the institutions that shape and transmit both.

Curator: Mariko Mugwyler, Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich