Peter Märkli Drawings

Peter Märkli’s buildings and drawings are part of the same awkwardly beautiful family. The drawings with thick, erased, re-incised lines, the buildings with rough surfaces and patiently crafted proportions, talk about exploration and doubt and open-ended creativity. Just as they avoid the quality of magically finished products, they resist historical periodization and transcend a regional cultural context. This work is at once intensely personal and intensely of the world it inhabits.
The tension one perceives in Märkli’s work between individual judgment and adherence to universal rules raises the question of sources – the background knowledge that has informed particular sketches and buildings, the internal domain to which they give expression. Such backgrounds could be articulated as thematic or biographical sections, but Märkli thinks spatially and thus talks about these personal coordinates as ‘rooms’. These ‘rooms’, representing different cultural or professional conditions, are only partially enclosed. They overlap and radiate in different directions, while he who stated their existence preserves an admirable ambiguity about further definition.
Märkli’s preferred vehicle for articulating thought is the conversation. From his conversations with several people, one may come to recognise a number of such rooms, ranging in size, atmosphere and degrees of enclosure.