ANNE LOCH RETURNS TO THE SPOTLIGHT IN BERN
Flowers nearly two meters tall, a flock of sheep stretching more than three and a half meters across, and a raven’s head enlarged beyond human scale introduce the monumental dimensions that define much of Anne Loch’s work. Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern brings together around 80 works by the German artist for Anne Loch. Painting: So what?, curated by Amélie Joller and on view through September 20, 2026. The exhibition marks only her second major solo presentation in Switzerland and opens a window onto an extensive body of work that remained largely outside the institutional spotlight for decades.
Loch began her career within Cologne’s increasingly visible art scene of the 1980s, represented early on by Monika Sprüth alongside artists including Rosemarie Trockel, Jenny Holzer and Cindy Sherman. Yet while neo-expressionist gestures were gathering momentum around her, Loch took a markedly different route, painting landscapes, flowers and animals with a cool, constructed precision. Then, in 1988, just as a conventional version of artistic success seemed to be taking shape, she left Cologne behind and withdrew to Thusis in the Swiss canton of Grisons, largely cutting herself off from the art world while continuing to work relentlessly.
Anne Loch in her studio in Thusis, 1989 | image: Estate of Anne Loch | photo: Christoph Guler, Thusis
WHEN FLOWERS GET BIG ENOUGH TO BECOME STRANGE
Across a career of roughly four decades, Loch produced some 1,400 paintings alongside drawings, photographs, texts and video works. Her subjects could hardly be more familiar: mountains, blossoms, sheep, deer, moths and trees. They are motifs with enough decorative baggage to make any contemporary painter slightly nervous. Loch, however, leaned straight into them. Rather than treating their familiarity with irony, she enlarged photographic source material to monumental proportions, turning ostensibly conventional images into something increasingly detached from the things they depict.
That estrangement becomes clearer the closer the viewer gets. From across the room, colors appear saturated and the subjects remain instantly legible; at close range, forms begin to dissolve into lines, surfaces and patches of thinly applied acrylic. Loch carefully planned her compositions through photography before beginning to paint, stripping away the idea of the spontaneous painterly gesture. The result sits somewhere between seduction and distance: a flower may still be a flower, but at 200 centimeters tall it starts behaving rather differently.
AL 235, 1987 | image: Estate of Anne Loch | photo: Dominique Uldry, Bern
PAINTING, WITHOUT THE NEED FOR A GRAND EXPLANATION
Loch was explicit about what she was not trying to do. Her work resisted social commentary, utopian narratives and autobiographical storytelling, focusing instead on color, surface, space and the relationships between lines. As motifs were enlarged, flattened and reconfigured, their original referents became increasingly unstable. Figuration slips toward abstraction, drawing edges into painting, and reality becomes just unreliable enough to keep things interesting. The exhibition’s title, Painting: So what?, feels suitably pointed: instead of offering paintings as containers of hidden messages, it asks what happens when looking itself becomes the subject.
Following her withdrawal from Cologne, Loch continued producing work in relative isolation, first in Switzerland and later back in Germany, with only occasional exhibitions. Her estate, now held in Bern, reveals the scale of a practice that never actually stopped when its public visibility did. At Zentrum Paul Klee, the oversized flowers, animals and landscapes finally get the room — and the audience — they demand. There are no dramatic manifestos waiting behind the petals. Sometimes a raven is a raven, a mountain is a mountain, and painting is allowed to cause enough trouble on its own.
AL 356, 1990 | image: private collection | photo: Dominique Uldry, Bern
AL 206, 1987 | image: private collection | photo: Dominique Uldry, Bern