During her lifetime, Ottilie Wilhelmine Roederstein (1859–1937) was the most important female Swiss painter. Her portraits and still lifes were widely admired not only in her homeland but also in Germany and France, and from 1883 onwards she successfully exhibited her work in Paris, London, Frankfurt am Main and Chicago. In 1912 she was the only female artist representing Switzerland at the seminal ‘International Art Exhibition of the Sonderbund’ in Cologne – alongside male colleagues including Ferdinand Hodler, Giovanni Giacometti and Cuno Amiet. Yet despite her considerable international renown, Roederstein lapsed into obscurity almost immediately after her death. More than 80 years on, the exhibition of some 70 works at the Kunsthaus Zürich is the first monographic presentation in Switzerland to place this artist’s stylistically diverse oeuvre once again before a wider audience.

From conventional to adventurous

Roederstein, who signed her works with the initials OWR, worked specifically for the art market, in order to make her living as a freelance artist. She adhered to the conventions that female artists were expected to abide by. Early in her career, that meant employing a dark-toned palette of colours and choosing portraits and still lifes as her subjects. Yet she soon found herself venturing beyond the allotted domain of women painters, producing religious images and nudes.

Around 1893, encouraged by her study of works from the Italian and German Renaissance, she began painting in tempera. This technique, which underwent a revival across Europe in the closing years of the 19th century, was regarded as at once traditional and avant-garde. In her more mature work, Roederstein exhibited a growing openness to other trends, incorporating both Impressionist and Symbolist elements into her art. Then, in the 1920s, she adopted her signature, objective and sober visual language. Her many self-portraits played a large role in her work. Designed by curator Sandra Gianfreda to include a representative selection of paintings and drawings, the exhibition visits the principal locations of Roederstein’s career – Zurich, Paris, Frankfurt am Main and Hofheim am Taunus – in chronological order, and is enhanced by previously unpublished photographic and archive material. It also includes around a dozen paintings held by the Kunsthaus itself, which began collecting Roederstein’s works in the 1890s and showed them in fifteen solo and group exhibitions up until 1934.