March 19th – May 23rd, 2026
Niklaus Stoecklin
Hauser & Wirth
In Person Viewing:
Luftgässlein 4, 4051 Basel, Switzerland
Online Viewing:
https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/niklaus-stoecklin/
Focusing on the 20th-century Swiss artist Niklaus Stoecklin (1896–1982), the gallery is pleased to presents a group of paintings and drawings from the 1920s to the 1970s, including several works that have rarely been shown in public before.
Curated by Martin Schwander, traces Stoecklin’s artistic development from the coolly detached figuration of the interwar period to the diaphanous luminosity of his late work. It follows on from group exhibitions on New Objectivity painting in Mannheim and Chemnitz last year, which highlighted Stoecklin’s contribution to this important modernist artistic movement.
Niklaus Stoecklin, born into a Basel merchant family, showed exceptional talent for drawing from an early age. At the beginning of 1914, he enrolled at the School of Applied Arts in Munich. When World War I broke out, he returned to Basel, where he continued his education for a short time at the Arts and Crafts School. Stoecklin did most of his military service in Ticino and the lake landscape there inspired him to create his first masterpiece, the painting ‘Casa rossa’ (1917). After his active service, Stoecklin established himself in Basel as a painter, graphic artist and book illustrator. In 1918, together with Alice Bailly, Fritz Baumann, his siblings Francisca and Fritz Stoecklin, Sophie Taeuber and others, he was one of the founding members of the short-lived artists’ association ‘Das Neue Leben (The New Life)’. The painting shown here, ‘Landscape near San Gimignano’ (1921), was created during a trip to Italy in the spring of 1921. The following year, Stoecklin married the bookseller Elisabeth Schnetzler.
