Around 1970 Heiner Kielholz belonged to the young Swiss avant-garde. However, he soon withdrew from the bustling art world. Subsequently his path led him on many journeys mainly to Eastern and Southern Europe, to Greece and to Turkey. In his rare exhibitions he offers insight into his artistic oeuvre, which constantly oscillates on the border between the outer and inner world. At the Bündner Kunstmuseum work groups of the last 30 years are at the centre. Heiner Kielholz created these in the Southern Alps where has been living and working for some time.

Thrown back on his immediate surroundings and his own closest living space, Heiner Kielholz has reached a state of great concentration, but also of surprising freedom and independence. In the exhibition works are united from the Veltlin, the Val Camonica or the Puschlav, images in which the artist condenses experiences resulting from his journeys into other cultural areas. The artist searches for different possibilities of finding pictorial equivalents for visible reality. A view into the world becomes the subject of his painting. However, he sometimes also places abstract models face to face with the world of things. Recently his travels find an echo in a continuously more radical withdrawal and a conscious limitation in the choice of motifs in restrained still lifes and interiors. Thereby Heiner Kielholz resists any fixed placing. He deliberately puts himself on the outside and yet again and again hits directly into the heart of life and art.

Opening: Friday, June 6, 2014, 6 pm
Introduction: Stephan Kunz, Director Bündner Kunstmuseum

Catalogue
Heiner Kielholz, with texts by Stephan Kunz and Gian Casper Bott, Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur, Zürich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2014, 80 pages, 47 illustrations