Community

History of the work

South of the long apartment block at Waldmannstrasse 53 in the Tscharnergut estate stands an iron sculpture titled “Gemeinschaft” (Community). Marguerite Saegesser-Rüfenacht made it in 1968. The city's building inventory lists it with the apartment block, and the Swiss art lexicon SIKART also includes an iron sculpture of 1968 in the Tscharnergut in the artist's list of works.

The building behind it is one of the largest on the estate: the slab blocks at Waldmannstrasse 53 and 67 were built in 1960/61 and each have 112 flats reached by access balconies. The Tscharnergut itself goes back to land the city bought in 1948/49. After an ideas competition in 1955, a total of 1168 flats were built between 1958 and 1965, together with shops, a community centre, kindergartens and schools. According to the building inventory, the estate later served as a model for many large housing schemes in and around Bern.

Marguerite Saegesser was born in Bern in 1922. After her school-leaving exam she studied violin at the conservatory in Lausanne and trained there as a sculptor with Milo Martin. Until the mid-1950s she cast nudes in bronze; with the switch to iron, the figure disappeared from her work. SIKART describes her free-standing sculptures of the 1960s as rhythmically structured, made of elongated geometric parts that look light despite the heavy material. In Bern she also made the “Goalie” of 1957 at the former Wankdorf stadium.

In the 1970s she gave up sculpture. From 1974 to 2004 she lived in the USA, last in Palo Alto, where she made monotypes from 1978 and painted from 1982. She died in Muri near Bern in 2011. She was given her first solo show in a museum only in 2023, at the Kunstmuseum Thun. Standing in front of “Gemeinschaft”, you are looking at one of the late sculptures of an artist who soon afterwards changed medium.

Researched and summarised by Bärn Kit. Sources: Kultur Stadt Bern, Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (offene Daten) · SIKART: Marguerite Saegesser · Bauinventar Stadt Bern: Waldmannstrasse 25, 39, 53, 67 · Bauinventar Stadt Bern: Baugruppe Tscharnergut · Wikimedia Commons: Eisenplastik Gemeinschaft (Marguerite Saegesser-Rüfenacht 1968)