Autumn Whispers

Autumn is the season of subtleties: the radiance of colors before they fade, nature’s silence before winter, the whisper of transience. With Autumn Whispers, Galerie Karsten Greve St. Moritz celebrates this delicate atmosphere, presenting a selection of international artists whose works engage in subtle, multilayered dialogues.

Louise Bourgeois channels memory and emotion into dense sculptural forms—oscillating between shelter and dissolution, departure and return. Jean Dubuffet and Louis Soutter unleash raw, untamed gestures that erupt like elemental forces of nature, reflecting the cycle of growth and decay.

The works of Wols occupy a singular position. His Untitled from 1946, oil on canvas, embodies a fragile equilibrium between extreme concentration and inner openness. Executed with meticulous precision, it unfolds a pictorial universe in which organic forms, traces, and lines intertwine to create a silent microcosm. Simultaneously, the work marks a pivotal moment in Wols’ practice—a shift toward a novel abstract visual language that decisively shaped Art Informel, establishing him as one of its foremost pioneers. Within this painting, the processes of becoming and fading inscribe themselves—a poetic echo of nature’s cycles, where autumn, transience, and artistic renewal converge.

Ilse Bing and Lynn Davis transform light into the resonance of autumn—ephemeral as mist, clear as the first frost. Their photographs capture moments in which time appears to pause, rendering external landscapes into intimate, inner worlds. Kathleen Jacobs engages directly with the forces of nature: wind, weather, and tree bark leave their traces on her surfaces, producing quiet chronicles of transformation that render the rhythms of the year tangible.

Qiu Shihua constructs landscapes of almost imperceptible presence, in which contemplative emptiness mediates a subtle equilibrium between mind and nature, heaven and earth. Reinterpreting the Chinese landscape tradition (Shan Shui), he employs a near-monochromatic palette, nuanced with delicate tonal modulations, to create spaces where silence and void operate as poetic and spiritual devices. Rooted in Daoist and Zen Buddhist philosophies, Qiu conceives emptiness not as absence but as a generative openness, fostering reflection and presence. The resulting imagery evokes a meditative stillness, a refined poetics of the moment in which observation itself becomes contemplative practice.

Leiko Ikemura situates her fragile, melancholic figures at the intersection of cultural and aesthetic traditions, establishing pictorial spaces where Eastern and Western references, myth, and memory converge. Her practice negotiates the boundary between figuration and abstraction, producing compositions that distill color, form, and gesture into existentially resonant moments. Through this interplay, Ikemura cultivates a quiet intensity, inviting viewers into reflective pauses where psychological and cultural layers coexist within a single luminous image.

Autumn Whispers thus emerges as a multilayered fabric of voices that—like autumn itself—speak not in volume but in enduring subtlety. Here, art and nature, cultures and spiritual visions are not presented as opposites, but as a shared language of transformation, remembrance, and renewal. Nietzsche praised the clarity of the Upper Engadin’s air and light, while Freud and Rilke discovered in its landscape a fusion of inner reflection and expansive vistas. In this tradition, Autumn Whispers positions itself as a poetic space where art and autumnal light converge.

Galerie Karsten Greve remains open throughout the autumn season, and we warmly welcome visitors to experience and be inspired by this exceptional atmosphere.