ALPINE AVANT-GARDE

Switzerland’s serene Engadine Valley has become the unlikely star of the European contemporary art world . Simon Will is discovers revolutionary works in a fairy-tale setting .

- Simon Will

AT FIRST GLANCE, the village of Susch looks sleepy and conservative. Sitting at the lower end of the Engadine Valley, in southeastern Switzerland, it is little more than a cluster of Alpine dwellings, unchanged for centuries and housing just 200 people. Until recently, the main draw for visitors was a clinic for people with burnout, who chose to go there, presumably, because it is so quiet. It seems, in other words, an unlikely home for one of Europe’s boldest new contemporary art museums.

But, in 2019, that is what the village became, when the Muzeum Susch opened in two beautifully renovated buildings on the banks of the Inn River—one a 12th-century monastery and the other a 19th-century brewery. The museum was founded by Grażyna Kulczyk, a Polish entrepreneur who wanted a space to showcase works by female artists she felt had been overlooked by the art world.

When I visited in December 2020, the main event was an exhibition devoted to Evelyne Axell, a Belgian painter who died in 1972 at age 37 and whose work shows off Kulczyk’s taste for radical expression. Axell studied with the surrealist painter René Magritte and embraced pop art before arriving at her signature style: joyfully erotic images of women’s bodies, painted in oil or collaged out of coloured plastic, through which she explored her own complex sexuality and ideas of female emancipation. Her pieces may have been executed in the psychedelic colours of the 1960s and 70s, but they resonate strongly in the era of #MeToo.