Oui Oui

History of the work

On the northern noise barrier of Ansermetplatz, on the western edge of the city in the Gäbelbach area, hangs a work of stainless steel. Its title is 'Oui Oui'. Wikidata describes it as a word play and steel sculpture and classes it as language art. The city dates it to 2004, the year in which Reinhart Morscher died in May.

The square lies at the junction between the high-rise estates of Gäbelbach and Holenacker and the Brünnen district. At the inauguration of Brünnen in September 2008, city councillor Regula Rytz recalled that a turning loop and a waiting shelter of the bus line at the Gäbelbach terminus used to stand here. The streets and squares of Brünnen are named after personalities from French-speaking Switzerland; the sequence begins with the square named after the conductor Ernest Ansermet.

Morscher was born on 11 February 1938 in Bludenz in Vorarlberg, Austria. From 1957 he attended the foundation course and the graphic design class of the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule in Basel, then worked for advertising agencies and moved to Bern in 1970, where he was art director at Hablützel & Jaquet until 1973. After that he ran his own studio for 'graphic design, language and painting'. According to Wikipedia his 1974 poster for Schweppes is a classic: it shows the bottle without any lettering. From 1980 to 1998 he taught at the Basel school of design, first 'experimental language', later semiotics.

Morscher's art for buildings includes works at the cantonal police training centre in Ittigen in 1981, at the gymnasium in the Matte in 1990 and in Biel in 1996. He sometimes called such works image-word-sound installations. SIKART lists him as a painter, designer and language artist. Standing on Ansermetplatz, you can read how words and steel come together on the wall.

Researched and summarised by Bärn Kit. Sources: Kultur Stadt Bern, Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (offene Daten) · Wikipedia (de): Reinhart Morscher · SIKART: Reinhart Morscher · Stadt Bern, Referat Regula Rytz zur Einweihung Brünnen (2008) · Wikidata: OUI OUI · Wikimedia Commons: Stahlplastik OUI OUI