The architect Erwin Oberwiler (1935-2017), born in Saint-Gall, began his career in various offices in Basel before joining Paul Waltenspühl in Geneva, first as his assistant, then associate. In the 1990s, he played a leading role in transforming the former premises of the Société genevoise d’instruments physiques in Plainpalais into a museum space.

Having trained at the Basel Kunstgewerbeschule in the 1950s, Erwin Oberwiler was always an art lover. His insatiable curiosity and passion for art saw him build an outstanding collection from 1958 to his death in 2017, reflecting the breadth of his own tastes and the vitality of the contemporary Swiss art scene. He was faithful to a number of artists and galleries on both sides of the Sarine, concentrating on a handful of talents, often at the outset of their career, and buying works representative of their creative practice. The collection, largely on paper, ranges from geometric abstraction descended from concrete art to works close to the new-wave expressionism in Switzerland in the early 1980s.

The Musée des beaux-arts received the collection of over one thousand works in 2018 and now holds it as a special collection in Erwin Oberwiler’s memory.