Opening "Otto Dix and Switzerland"

Otto Dix (1891-1969) is considered one of the most important German artists of the 20th century. His committed realism made him famous in the 1920s, but made him an ostracized artist during the Nazi era. In 1933 he lost his professorship at the Dresden Art Academy, and his works were considered "degenerate art". Otto Dix retired to Lake Constance near the Swiss border and created numerous landscape paintings from 1934 to 1945, which reflect the upheavals and contradictions of the time in a surprising way. What is striking about these works is the Old Master style of painting, which stands in stark contrast to the expressionist work. His landscapes are regarded as images of an "inner emigration" and, with their almost uncanny emptiness, convey an unease in time.

In the 1930s, Switzerland was an important point of reference in Otto Dix's painting and drawing. However, his artistic and biographical connections to Switzerland have so far received little attention. The Graubünden Art Museum explores this in a specific exhibition as well as a detailed publication. At the centre of the exhibition are the works of Otto Dix, which were created at the end of the 1930s, when the artist spent a long time in the Engadine for a cure, and which have never been shown together before. For the first time, the painting San Gian in Winter from the collection of the Graubünden Art Museum can be shown in a larger context of other oil paintings and a series of extremely fine drawings.