For the 100th birthday of the artist, as famous as he is ostracised, in the summer of 2009 Museum of Art Lucerne is showing the most extensive Hans Erni exhibition ever seen. In a selection of around 250 works it presents both familiar and surprising aspects of an extremely rich oeuvre produced over a period of eighty years. One of the highlights will be the 90-metre long mural Switzerland – holiday country of the nations, which Erni produced for the national exhibition in 1939, and which will now be seen in larger interconnecting representative sections for the first time since 1939.

A great deal of room will also be given to the artist’s early work. At the beginning of the 1930s Erni was in Paris, at the forefront of developments in abstract art, and in 1935 brought many of the international avant-garde artists to Lucerne for the remarkable exhibition ‘Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis’. Subsequently he further developed his abstract art into representational realism and merged the two expressive forms. In the exhibition this process will be made most excitingly apparent in an unparalleled sequence of paintings from 1933 until 1942.

Hans Erni’s self-image follows a highly humanistic artistic tradition. His interests, his areas of activity, his themes, his media are correspondingly diverse. What remains is an impressive socially and environmentally political commitment, behind which the artist stands as an ever-alert and critical contemporary. This may be seen in numerous poster designs, which will also be prominently represented in the exhibition.