Exhibition
Rolf Bräm
Lived through and painted. Being on the Bernina, Albula or Stelvio pass. Letting yourself go, finding a good rhythm. Taking in the landscape as it passes by. Being on the move. Climbing, mountain passes, ever-changing views. Exertion and feelings of joy. Experiences and sights. The cyclist in the mighty Alpine world: A challenge and a symbiosis at the same time.
This gives rise to Rolf Bräm’s road bike Alpine pass paintings: Images that tell stories. Images that come alive. The aim is not a realistic reproduction, but to convey the impressions experienced. In the form of abstraction and reduction to the essentials, as a graphically clear visual language.
Previous exhibitions
Rolf Bräm began his artistic career decades ago. It all started with ‘RockArt’. Even back then, he was fascinated by the mountains, though he depicted them in a compressed and abstract style, using vivid, otherworldly colours. At the same time, he created a large number of stone and rock installations featuring ‘floating stones’, some of which weighed up to 40 tonnes. In 1994, he painted a “John Lennon Portrait” as part of RockArt, which was sold several times as a limited-edition art print on Swiss television for the Swiss Glückskette charity chain. Similarly, in 1996, he exhibited the “Hermann Hesse Portrait” as a guest of honour at the Hermann Hesse Museum in Montagnola, Ticino. With the move of his studio from Grabs to Sargans, Rolf Bräm began to further abstract and develop his mountain paintings.
A new creative period began in the early 2000s. Rolf Bräm created objects from wood. Mostly raw fir slats appear as “bizarre, wild mountain spirits”. Nevertheless, “they radiate a playful lightness” (quote from Katrin Wetzig, BR journalist).
In parallel, Rolf Bräm continued to develop his painting technique of mountains in various abstractions, which now, in 2026, takes on a special significance with the Alpine passes on the racing bike.