Fribourg museum celebrates local talent

The Art and History Museum in the town of Fribourg is honouring a largely unknown local artist, Antoine Claraz, with a retrospective of his work.

Claraz was born in Fribourg in 1909 and died there in 1997, and spent his prolific working life primarily in the French-speaking part of the country. Most of his early work was devoted to painting, but after 1943 Claraz concentrated exclusively on sculpture.

The museum has brought together sculptures, paintings, drawings and countless three-dimensional drafts for monumental projects illustrating the figurative aspects of his work. The exhibition runs from August 18 to October 15.

Claraz does not feature in most reference works on artists. But the museum has chosen to focus on him as an artist who contributed many works to the public domain, which have remained anonymous. One of these is a monument to the Abbot Bovet in the nearby town of Bulle.

In fact Claraz, whose sculpting career began in 1936 and took off in the 1950s, worked extensively in the religious field. Many Catholic parishes and religious communities in Fribourg, but also as far afield as Geneva, Neuchatel, Vaud and the Valais, commissioned works from him in the wake of the revolution in Catholic liturgy brought about by the Vatican in the 1960s.

The museum says his profound religious knowledge and technical skills contributed to his fame in the region as a religious sculptor.

swissinfo