Alfons Bürgler

BIOGRAPHY

Alfons Bürgler (* 9th January 1936 in Illgau, Switzerland) is a Swiss artist. He lives and works in Steinen, Switzerland. His working techniques include acrylic and oil painting, watercolour, drawing, glass engraving, collage, etching, screen printing, sculpture and photography. His pictures, objects and sculptures are mainly in Switzerland, but can also be found abroad. In the last 15 years, Bürgler has received many commissions for art in public buildings and privat residencies.

Alfons Bürgler is the sixth of eleven siblings. He grew up in a small mountain village overlooking the Muota valley as the son of a shoemaker. Even as a teenager he drew with passion. His first job as a tailor took him for longer stays to French and Italian Switzerland. 1967 he married the singer Margrith Suter and they have two daughters. While working a part-time job in an architectural office he attended art schools in Zurich, Lucerne and Salzburg. He undertook trips in Europe, the United States and North Africa. From 1984 Alfons Bürger worked as a freelance artist. In 1993 he and his wife went their separate ways. Alfons Bürgler moved to a small wooden hut at the edge of Goldau, where he lived until 1999, when he moved to Steinen. Exhibitions and publications made him known to a wider public. Various clients appreciated his unmistakable language and his diverse themes and involved him in the artistic enrichment of their private or public buildings. In 2007 he established a small private museum in Steinen for his tree figures, the "Baumfigurenkabinett", which has become a popular cultural center in Central Switzerland. His gallery house, where a large part of his work is shown in a permanent exhibition, opened in 2016. His simple life, but also his complex work, is marked by a love of nature, especially herbs and mushrooms, but also of dance.

The Austrian writer Alfred Polgar described the master of life as a person who "experiences his summer in such a way that it warms him in winter". Alfons Bürgler managed to turn the "autumn of life" into summer.