Hans Krüsi

1920-1995 · St. Gallen, Switzerland

A Zürich street flower seller who started doodling cows on café napkins to boost sales, and ended up in the Collection de l’Art Brut.

The life

Krüsi was born in 1920 and grew up poor in eastern Switzerland with foster parents and in an orphanage, leaving school early. He worked as a farmhand and gardener before settling in St. Gallen in 1947 and commuting to Zürich, where he ran a flower stall on the Bahnhofstrasse. In the mid-1970s he began making small drawings and paintings to sell beside the flowers, starting with felt-tip line drawings on thin café napkins. A first exhibition at the Buchmann Galerie in early 1981 and the press attention that followed let him give up floristry and paint full time. He lived simply among cats and pigeons, calling himself a picture painter, and died in St. Gallen in 1995.

The work

Paintings and collages on free materials: wrapping paper, cardboard, napkins, in urgent psychedelic colour, with cows above all. “Most of all, I love to paint cows,” he said. He also made thousands of Polaroids, tape recordings of ambient sound, and photocopier variations of his own motifs, leaving an estate of some 4,000 works. He is held by the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and Kunstmuseum Thurgau.

Why we love them

He turned a flower stall into a one-man art movement. The napkin cow might be the most Swiss masterpiece format ever invented.

Go deeper

• Hans Krüsi at the Outsider Art Fair
• Hans Krüsi on Wikipedia
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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