Niele Toroni retrospective spans six decades in Swiss museums

A dual exhibition in Ascona and Locarno, Switzerland, celebrates the work of Swiss painter Niele Toroni, born in Muralto in 1937. The show at Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna di Ascona, curated by Bernard Marcadé, is accompanied by a book of writings rather than a traditional catalogue, featuring a long interview with Toroni from the late 1990s and texts exploring his artistic and intellectual friendship with curator Harald Szeemann. Szeemann curated Toroni's first show in Ticino in 1991, and the current exhibition includes documents, photographs, and works that reveal Toroni's radical method: brush imprints no. 50 repeated at regular intervals of 30 cm, a practice he has maintained for nearly sixty years. Toroni first applied this method in Paris alongside Buren, Mosset, and Parmentier. The Ascona show is part of the larger retrospective 'Niele Toroni. Impronte di pennello n. 50 dal 1959 al 2024' at Museo Casa Rusca in Locarno, running from March 16 to August 17, 2025, featuring over 80 works from Swiss and international private and institutional collections, some never exhibited before. The book is published by Edizioni Casagrande.