STOHLER Peter
Director Kunstmuseum Thurgau (Art Museum of Thurgovia) and Ittinger Museum (Museum of the Carthusian monastery Ittingen)
Switzerland, Warth, Thurgau
Peter Stohler (b. 1967 in Belp, Switzerland) is a curator of contemporary art, museum director, writer and art consultant. After completing his studies in art and film studies at the University of Zurich, Stohler worked in museums and galleries, where he organised thematic exhibitions (e.g. ‘Body Extensions’, 2004, or ‘Risk and Allure’, 2006) as well as solo shows. He has also curated many group and solo exhibitions with contemporary artists, such as Karim Noureldin (2014), Rachel Lumsden (2018) and Necla Rüzgar (2019), and directed various art and cultural history museums in Switzerland and Germany. Furthermore, he has edited numerous publications, including collection catalogues (‘From Anselm to Zilla. The collection of P. and E. Bosshard’, Lars Müller, 2018), interview compilations (‘Tomograph’, Arnoldsche, 1999), and monographs, most recently ‘My Name Was Written on Every Page. Necla Rüzgar’, modo, 2021). He is currently the director of the Kunstmuseum Thurgau and Ittinger Museum in Warth, Switzerland.
How to Display Outsider Art in a Contemporary Way
Outsider Art, also known as ‘art brut’ (literally ‘raw art’, a term defined by the French artist Jean Dubuffet), refers to works created by self-taught artists outside the mainstream. Since the 1990s the Kunstmuseum Thurgau, a non-specialist museum, has held the largest collection of Outsider Art in Switzerland (including Aloïse Corbaz, Hans Krüsi and Adolf Wölfli). Until now, however, the museum has shown very few works in its permanent exhibition.
A new presentation of the collection aims to redress the situation. First, we need to decide which works to select. At the same time, we need to rethink what Outsider Art means in a global context. Once a phenomenon of Europe and the USA, Outsider Art now reaches as far as Taiwan, where the works by Hung Tung (1920–2015) and Wang Ting-Yu (b. 1961) are well known, as is a group exhibition on the subject (‘Outsider Art in Taiwan’, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2008).
In addition to the selection of works, there is another important question: How are works by outsider artists shown? I will discuss this in a series of case studies focusing on works from specialist and non-specialist art museums, always in the contexts of the chosen form of presentation. My analysis is based on the ‘mysterious’ presentation in the dark (Collection de l'art brut, Lausanne, Switzerland, which opened in 1976), which was seen as natural and appropriate for decades.
The central question is this: How neutral should the surrounding space, the display, be? How ‘charged’ the presentation, for example by using spotlights? I will discuss new forms of presentation such as those seen at the LAM (Lille/France) or the SAAM (Washington D.C./USA). Furthermore, I would like to explore how museums can better convey the history of objects, i.e. their cultural context, through digital means.
Outsider Art / collection presentation / exhibition design / cultural context