20 January 2016 // Sanne Schrijver //Amersfoort

//URSUS WEHRLI

Ursus Wehrli’s first picture books, “Tidying Up Art” and its sequel, “Tidying Up More Art”, present a simple overview in which he “tidies up” modern masterpieces from Klee, Picasso, Pollock and Haring in a series of before and after photos. Wehrli deconstructs painting in the “afters” (body parts in a Picasso or squares in a Klee) and then stacks them in neat, color specific rows.

In 2011 Wehrli published a new cool book “The Art of Clean Up: Life Made Neat and Tidy”. From bringing new meaning to ordering ordinary items to arranging a bouquet of flowers by leaf and color. His obsessive deconstruction and reorganization of life’s necessary small chaos comes together in this book. It results in an absolutely delightful and playful abstraction, and it remind us to bring order to the chaos of life. He rearranges our chaotic world and its everyday objects into neat rows, sorted by color, size, shape, or type. You might think it’s a case of OCD, but Ursus Wehrli is perfectly fine, he has a really good sense of humor.