The Kunsthaus Zürich devotes two galleries to Genevan artist Alice Bailly (1872–1938). Her innovative wool pictures – balancing abstraction and figuration – are today recognised as key works of Swiss modernism.

Pioneer of modernism

Alice Bailly was among the first Swiss women artists to break with academic tradition. Between Paris, Geneva and Lausanne, she developed a distinctive visual language from 1906 onward, influenced by Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism.

Her wool pictures, or tableaux-laine, lend painting a new tactile quality, uniting texture and vivid colour. Dismissed during her lifetime as mere handicraft, they are now seen as a visionary response to a male-dominated modernism.