MASI Lugano:

The exhibition traces the years that the Russian artist Alexej von Jawlensky (1864-1941) spent in Ticino. Jawlensky was a co-founder of the New Artists' Association in Munich and a member of the Blaue Reiter. At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 he left Germany in flight. After first settling in Saint-Prex, he came to Ascona, where he met artists such as Ferdinand Hodler and Cuno Amiet. In Zurich he associated with the representatives of the Dada movement. But the time in the small Ticino town between 1918 and 1921 was to remain decisive for Jawlensky's artistic development. Amidst the already Mediterranean landscape and the corresponding light, the artist created his last landscape paintings here, before he then turned almost exclusively to the depiction of the human face or the Christ in mystical tonalities. On the banks of the Verbano consolidates his personal pictorial language, in which the bright colors and striking lines of expressionism combine with the simplified forms and chromatic transparencies of abstraction.