Lika Nüssli: ›Für die Katz‹

The award-winning artist Lika Nüssli draws inspiration from Robert Walser's 1000 or so short texts and transforms their subtle irony into powerful, poetic watercolors. In 69 large-format works, Nüssli unfolds a playful and imaginative pictorial dialog with Walser. The exhibition also marks the publication of the feuilleton section of Robert Walser's works in the authoritative Bern edition by Suhrkamp Verlag - a literary event that will also be celebrated in Bern in terms of visual art.

The seven-volume edition on display in the exhibition brings together all of Robert Walser's short texts - stories and prose pieces, poems and theater scenes - that originally appeared in newspapers and magazines, in the order in which they were published. This 'writing for the cat', as Walser called his work for the media at the time, was his main literary business. He pursued it throughout his entire career as an author - from his first poems in 1898 to the last texts published by his guardian in 1948. The feuilletons show Walser to be a keen observer of his time, a master of miniature and a tireless experimenter with language and form. With the Bern edition, these texts are now being made available to a wide audience for the first time in a complete, annotated edition.

Lika Nüssli, the St. Gallen artist who attracted international attention with her impressive graphic novel Starkes Ding, is particularly familiar with Robert Walser. "For me, Robert Walser is someone I think I've always known," she says. She came across his work in her youth - through her sister's books, a play in Herisau and later through the fascinating micrograms. Walser's writings, "full of wonderful irony and a cheeky wink", are still with her today.

"For me, drawing means thinking, observing the world and putting it into a form - as a suggestion, as an offer for others." In her exhibition, Nüssli makes visible how she spins Walser's stories further, twists them and expands them into the open, fluid. Her works emerge from the moment, relying on association, and transform time and space into that "little nothing" that opens up between Walser, his work and herself.

Lika Nüssli explores and tests narration in a variety of forms. Her extensive oeuvre, which includes drawings, illustrations, performances and texts, has received several awards, most recently the Swiss Literature Prize 2023 for the graphic novel Starkes Ding, published by Edition Moderne. The exhibition Lika Nüssli: 'Für die Katz' is an idiosyncratic and original examination of Robert Walser's feuilletons and at the same time a homage to his unmistakable literary universe.

Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.