Wall sculpture

History of the work

In the open entrance hall of the Schwabgut school at Keltenstrasse 37 hangs a relief of glass-fibre reinforced polyester, laminated by hand. The City of Bern dates it to 1969 and names Walter 'Pips' Vögeli as its author. According to an art walk through Bümpliz based on city material, the wall sculpture is made up of 101 elements; its file name on Wikimedia Commons says the same.

According to a city ballot document, the school was built between 1959 and the end of the 1960s and is part of the Schwabgut housing estate in the west of Bern. It comprises two school buildings, a gymnasium wing and a large outdoor area; the heritage office classes the buildings as worthy of protection. In the playground stand three concrete slabs that serve as both an art object and a climbing frame.

Vögeli was born in Winterthur in 1929, attended the schools of applied arts in Zurich and Lucerne, and after a stay in Paris settled in Bern in 1952, where he co-founded the Galerie 33. From 1955 he worked in iron. For the 'Weg der Schweiz' (Path of Switzerland) project at the 1964 national exhibition in Lausanne he first tried casting in plastic. After that, according to the artists' lexicon SIKART, he soon worked only with synthetic materials such as polyester and epoxy resin, as one of the first artists in Switzerland to do so.

In the 1960s he developed the Polymodul: coloured square or rectangular units with raised and recessed forms that can be combined in series into wall designs. SIKART explicitly lists the plastic wall sculptures at the Schwabgut school among his works; whether this relief is built on the Polymodul system, the sources do not say. In 1970 Vögeli exhibited at the Venice Biennale. He died in Bern in 2009.

For a complete renovation of the school the city put a building loan of 50 million francs to the voters; the work was to be carried out in stages from summer 2023. In autumn 2024 the wall sculpture was therefore inaccessible. Once it can be seen again, visitors can count the elements.

Researched and summarised by Bärn Kit. Sources: Kultur Stadt Bern, Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (offene Daten) · SIKART: Walter Vögeli (Michael Baumgartner) · Wikipedia (de): Walter Vögeli · Stadt Bern, Abstimmungsbotschaft: Gesamtsanierung Volksschule Schwabgut, Baukredit · Geocaching GCARD01: Kunstspaziergang Bümpliz (Kurzfassung eines Kunstspaziergangs der Stadt Bern) · Wikimedia Commons: Kunststoffplastik Wandplastik (Walter Vögeli 1969)