Swiss painter Peter Stämpfli (born 1931 in Deisswil bei Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland) started as a figurative visual artist, whose works were close in style to British
Pop Art. Later, his practice focused on the theme of the
automobile, creating artworks inspired by the representation of the tire, which he released from its environment to keep only the geometric and purified print, declined on different media.
Stämpfli has settled in Paris since 1959, and established very rapidly his career in the international art scene, being represented by prestigious galleries such Bruno Bischofberger in Zürich and Jean Larcade in Paris. Isolated on a plain white background, the character from "Autoportrait au raglan" ("Self-portrait with raglan"), as well as this dashboard of a car from "Ma voiture" ("My car"), both painted with much accuracy as distance, appear in 1963 already as a rare immediate answer in Europe in the surge of American Pop Art. "Like other European artists who had begun to look to the brash imagery and large scale of advertising, poster art, photography and the cinema as sources of inspiration for a reconfigured representational art that could rival the intensity and formal impact of abstraction, Stämpfli was encouraged to pursue this new direction by his awareness of American and British Pop Art" (Marco Livingstone). From 1966 onwards, he focused on a particular object of the consumer society – automobiles – and from 1970 on he restricted himself to tires, and precisely to tire treads. Peter Stämpfli developed a radically new pictorial language which featured an extremely magnified image of what he (paradoxically) calls the "sculpture of tire." From this sole and specific subject, he revisited the history of geometrical abstraction, transforming a very ordinary theme to illustrate "the power of the art to convert every elements with aesthetical qualities" (Henry Martin, in Art International, 1971). This single subject is, for Stämpfli, a way to question, without ever repeating himself, every technique and means employed in the execution of the painting. Working precisely and obsessively on tire tread prints, Stämpfli made this pattern his signature.
Today Peter Stämpfli's works are part of many public collections. Among them are: the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Kunstmuseum in Zürich.
