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Heiner Fierz «41»

Urban Paintings - City Views, City Escapes, City Life

Zurich-based Heiner Fierz (aka "41") has been painting plein air - in oil - for over 30 years. He mixes each colour tone on the palette to transfer it purely onto the canvas. His paintings are clearly zoned and soothingly colourful. They look like pastel and seem like watercolour.
In this way, Heiner Fierz poetically depicts cityscapes, technology, construction sites and wide views of the landscape. His urban paintings focus on change as a silent presence.


After further training at the School of Design (now ZHdK), Heiner Fierz set his sights on independent work in 1990 with a change of profession as a designer. In 2001, Heiner Fierz spent three months in New York exploring the theme of "urban painting", meanwhile experiencing the horrors of 9/11. That autumn he deepened his artistic reflection on the city as an urban space, the significance of individual buildings and places and their processes of change. Busy urban spaces and construction sites attract him.
Heiner Fierz lives in Zurich. He paints everywhere: also, on his travels at home and abroad. Heiner Fierz consistently covers his plein air palette with yellow, red, blue each in cold and warm tones, plus ochre, sienna and here and there one or two shades of green plus white, hardly any black. Heiner Fierz's own quiet and very personal signature is the zoned colourfulness. The artist neither sketches in advance nor paints from a model.

Heiner Fierz also achieves intensity with the stylistic element of plain strokes and calm surfaces. Fierz's pictures are filled with sunlight thanks to the contrasts of warm-cold and light-dark.
So far, more than 1000 works have been created. Fierz's paintings have found a place in private art collections in Switzerland and abroad (Switzerland, Germany, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, USA).
After 25 exhibitions, especially in Zurich, Heiner Fierz is exhibiting in Basel for the first time. Portraits can also be seen at the Rhy Art Salon in Basel.

Heiner Fierz

Heiner Fierz: Cloud Engineering, Diptychon / Öl auf Leinwand, 120 x 160 cm (total), 2012

Heiner Fierz

Heiner Fierz: Bodega, Münstergasse, Zürich / Öl auf Leinwand, 60 x100 cm, 2019