Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present Even a Nothing Can Become Something" : The Art of Hans Krüsi . Show dates will be February 12 - April 3, 2004.

Hans Krüsi (1920-1995) was  born in Switzerland in the countryside of Appenzell and spent most of his life in and around the city of St. Gallen. Remanded to an orphanage by the age of eight he later worked as a farmhand and gardner.  Krüsi began selling flowers on the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich in 1948 and did so for the next thirty years. In 1975, at age 55, he spontaneously took up drawing and painting and began to give away small postcard sized works to lure  customers. His works consisted mainly of rural imagery from his native region, specifically cows, alpine landscapes, and poyas-the ceremony of transferring the herds to the summer pastures up in the mountains. One day an art dealer happened by his stand and his career as an artist was underway. His first large exhibition was held in 1981 at the Buchmann Gallery in St. Gallen. Numerous exhibitions followed and in 1990 his 70th birthday was honored with solo exhibitions at the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne and the Lagerhouse Museum in St. Gallen. In 1995, the last year of his life, a retrospective exhibit was held at Karthause Ittingen, the Kunstmuseum des Kantons Thurgau.

Krüsi's first exhibit at Andrew Edlin Gallery in December 2002 marked the debut for his oeuvre outside of Europe and his life and work were the subjects of a feature article by Edward Gomez in the December 1 issue of the Sunday New York Times. This  exhibit will contain major works from several private Swiss collections as well as a Krüsi "cow roll", a 20 yard long , 7 inch high painting of a procession of cows that Krüsi would wrap around 2 spindles and then twist them back and forth to control the cow's movement, something he had trouble doing as a farmhand. The art of Hans Krüsi is in many private and public collections including the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, the Kunstmuseum des Kantons Thurgau/Karthause Ittingen, the Musée d'Art Moderne Lille Metropole in France, and the Outsider Archive in London. Two monographs have been published and will be available at the gallery.