"I feel nothing but a tremendous desire for colors, beautiful and cold like fruit."
Swiss painter Irène Zurkinden (1909–1987) spent her childhood in Basel and Münchenstein. As a young girl aspiring to become a fashion designer, she enrolled at the School of Arts and Crafts in Basel in 1925. She began her artistic career mainly with drawings and portraits, which she continued to produce until the end of her studies in 1929. That same year, Zurkinden took her first trip to Paris, where she trained at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
In 1932, she shared an apartment with Meret Oppenheim, with whom she had formed a friendship as a teenager. During this period, she lived between Paris and Basel and gained a reputation as a sought-after portraitist. Zurkinden’s style and the way she portrayed her friends and companions from the 1930s onward influenced successive generations of artists aiming to deconstruct the figure, such as Cecily Brown and George Condo.
Her work shows tightly composed and balanced figurative portraits (like the Portrait of Meret Oppenheim, 1934) and poetic still lifes (Still Life with Eggs). In her works, the female body is represented with eroticism and sensuality. Zurkinden’s work has rarely been exhibited outside Europe because her erotic portraits challenged the socially accepted subject matter for a female artist at the time.
Evolving from Impressionism toward Surrealism and influenced by music, Zurkinden moved between various styles but maintained a strong attachment to Surrealism. In rare and highly sought-after works, she dissected the world around her with much humor, always infused with sensuality and femininity.
