The presentation of works from the collection titled What Is Grey Exactly? points to the deliberate use of the (non-)colour grey in Swiss art from the 1950s to the present. The works of Balthasar Burkhard, Helmut Federle, Franz Fedier, Alex Hanimann, Markus Raetz or Hugo Suter allow viewers to appreciate the different motivations behind the artistic use of and reflection on grey. Grey can indeed be many things: a technical precondition, a material, a carrier of meaning, or a conceptual element.

Making a guest appearance are the sculptural paper works of Maia Aeschbach (b. 1928), which provide the starting point for the exhibition. The artist applied graphite on paper and then treated the surface with milk and lard. Out of the prefabricated papers she created softly gleaming objects whose effect is similar to that of metal. Because the artist tended to dismantle her works again, only few complete works survive today; almost all of these are now on view at the Aargauer Kunsthaus. Maia Aeschbach’s objects are displayed in the context of the large-scale paper works of Miriam Cahn, Marianne Kuhn, Klaudia Schifferle and Silvia Bächli from the 1980s.