From the second half of the last century, Werner Fehlmann and Bendicht Friedli were among the most influential artists in our region. Their works were represented in numerous exhibitions, including the annual Christmas exhibitions of the Interlaken Art Society. In 2001, it was also the Art Society that presented the work of the two artists together for the first and to date only time in a major exhibition in Trebon, a sister town of Interlaken in the Czech Republic.
Fehlmann and Friedli, do they even go together?
At the time, the relationship between the two painters was characterized by respectful distance. Their opinions on what painting should and should not be were quite far apart, and on the few occasions they met together at art society events, they were the starting point for mostly brief, controversial exchanges about art ...
Werner Fehlmann worked representationally and figuratively throughout his life. His work was based on his academic training, which he had received after an apprenticeship as a painter in his father's business during four years at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich under Otto Morach, Jakob Gubler, Johannes Itten and others, and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. His work ranges from naturalistic, clearly structured, often highly stylized depictions of the visible world to surreal, visionary mental images that admonishingly sketch a dark world.
Bendicht Friedli was initially a practicing doctor and was a self-taught artist. Classical, academic painting was alien to him; his focus was on playful, experimental searching or - as the art historian Peter Killer aptly put it - the path.1
Friedli's work ranges from expressive, usually very colorful depictions of his surroundings to free, abstract compositions.
Both artists are characterized by a strong emphasis on drawing, serial work and, in terms of content, the depiction of their immediate surroundings: their own family, the house cats, the garden with the flowers in front of the house, Lake Thun and the mountains. In addition - and much more importantly - the concern for the present and the future of this world.
This humanistic trait, in the broadest sense, in the work of both artists suggests that Werner Fehlmann and Bendicht Friedli are perhaps closer to each other in their artistic work than they themselves ever thought. Visitors can judge for themselves.


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