The infancy of signs

Drawings of New Guinean Children from the Wirz Collection.

Between 1952 and 1954, the artist Dadi Wirz and his father Paul, an anthropologist and collector, travelled to the Sepik River, a region rich in artistic production. The young artist, at that time a student at the Basel Academy of Fine Arts, distributed pencils and paints to the children of the villages he visited and invited them to draw freehand. He thus collected 229 drawings that are astonishing for their composition and repetition of forms and ultimately manifest the visual grammar that is the matrix of Sepik art.

The eighty drawings on display constitute an extraordinary document. They tell the story of the visual culture of a community at a precise moment in its history. Seventy years after their collection, the donation made to MUSEC thus becomes an opportunity to open up new reflections and perspectives investigating art, anthropology and pedagogy.

In the exhibition, the drawings dialogue with some masterpieces from Papua New Guinea from the Brignoni Collection and with a selection of contemporary works of art by local artists from Frankfurt's Welkulturen Museum.