Adrian Schiess’s art achieved significant visibility in the early 1990s. His huge, colourful floor panels seemed to bridge the gap between radical abstraction and minimalism. Yet he always saw his recognition as a “great misunderstanding” that could only be resolved by revealing another facet of his oeuvre – his works on paper. Drawing has been a daily creative practice for Adrian Schiess since the very start of his career, over forty years ago. He tries to reflect his surroundings on paper as straightforwardly as possible, without striving for virtuosity and without preconceptions. His colourful panels may only have taken on meaning in the play of light across their surface, but when he sits in front of a piece of paper, he seeks to become the mirror himself. This vast corpus – several drawings a day, for decades – is almost entirely unknown, yet it opens Adrian Schiess’s art up to more complex, individual questions: how, at the turn of the twenty-first century, can an artist come to terms with their own subjectivity, or contain it without denying it? If it is generally agreed that works of art reflect their own times, do they reflect the passage of time or the prevailing zeitgeist?

This exhibition is laid out like a personal record of drawings transgressing linear time. Calendar days may follow on from each other, but years jump back and forth to sketch out the advent of spring across the span of nearly twenty years.

Adrian Schiess was born in Zurich in 1959. He divides his time between Zurich and Le Locle.