The Fondation Beyeler is dedicating the first exhibition of the year to Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021), an extraordinary American painter whose work is little known in Europe. It is the first solo exhibition of the artist in the German-speaking world and only his second retrospective in Europe.

Thiebaud’s still lifes of everyday objects rendered in luscious pastel shades are powerful evocations of all that the “American way of life” promises; and his astonishing portraits, multi-perspective cityscapes and landscapes demonstrate just how versatile this technically brilliant painter was. With 65 works from public collections as well as private lenders, mostly from the United States, the retrospective will showcase Thiebaud’s most important bodies of work and will invite viewers to discover his unique style of painting and tactile handling of paint.

Thiebaud, who in the USA became famous above all for his still lifes, takes the possibilities of painterly expression to the limits of the seen and imagined world in a visual language that is forever oscillating between irony, wit, nostalgia and melancholy. Wayne Thiebaud ranks among the leading exponents of American figurative art in the tradition of painters such as Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe.