12 Landschaften
2004 - 2006Oil on canvaseach 16.5 x 33 cmExhibited in the “Forum” of the Ricola Kräuterzentrum in Laufen are twelve landscapes by Albrecht Schnider. The Kräuterzentrum is a rammed-earth building designed by the architects Herzog & de Meuron in which Ricola processes its herbs. Its Forum is a space for encounters centered not just on Ricola’s herb-processing expertise but also on the values of culture and sustainability, which here are conveyed visually. The sacks of dried herbs, for example, can be seen, smelled, and even touched. And alongside the paintings by Schnider, the Forum also contains a long table with chairs and two glass-fronted display cases: one for dried herbs and historical herbals and the other for items of ancient pottery made of the same material as the building that were found just a few hundred meters away on the site of the Roman villa in Laufen-Müschhag. Schnider’s landscapes displayed on the end walls of the Forum belong to a series of small-format oil paintings that the artist began in 1988 and has continued to this day—unlike his other early series. While the earlier works in the series were “real” landscapes showing the hills, meadows, and mountains of the countryside around Lucerne, where the artist born in 1958 grew up, the more recent additions under discussion here are better described as constructs that are reminiscent of landscapes only on account of their format, palette, and composition. “All these landscapes, with just a few exceptions, consist of just two elements,” explained Schnider in an interview of 2005, while working on the group of paintings shown here. “There is a small, bright patch in the upper half of the canvas that can be read as the sky, and then there is a carpet of color fields extending all the way down to the bottom, which creates an impression of ‘hills, terrain’. There is plenty of form, but otherwise nothing to be made out in these works. It is always about the bare essentials and about omitting all things superfluous, including narrative.”¹
Roman Kurzmeyer
¹ Albrecht Schnider in conversation with Friedrich Meschede, quoted from Friedrich Meschede, Etwas von Etwas – Abstrakte Kunst, Jahresring 52, Cologne 2005, pp. 238–239. 
