Bauer einen Schubkarren ziehend (Peasant Pulling a Wheelbarrow)

We are proud to present Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Bauer einen Schubkarren ziehend” as the centerpiece of our TEFAF 2026 presentation, marking the 80th anniversary of our gallery’s founding. The painting holds a distinguished place in our own history — it appeared on the cover of “Der Spiegel”, behind our founder and patron Roman Norbert Ketterer, who established the gallery in 1946.

This significant work is an early and powerful example of Kirchner’s so-called “New Style”, a pivotal phase currently celebrated in major museum exhibitions such as “Kirchner x Kirchner”at the Kunstmuseum Bern and “Kirchner. Picasso” at the LWL Museum in Münster.

1925/26, Kirchner painted the painting in the early forms of his then newly emerging ‘New Style’, in which the colour surfaces calmed down, they became more homogeneous and were captured by intertwined, alternating concave and convex lines, so that broad rounded forms alternated in strong colour contrasts, creating a monumental painting. After 1930, Kirchner covered these areas of colour with parallel hatching in line with his late art theory. These hatches mostly run diagonally from the bottom left to the top right, counteracting and balancing the counter-diagonal line that dominates the composition.

What you can see is a Davos mountain farmer pulling a wheelbarrow up a slope to the left. His bent figure dominates the painting. The slope in the lower left-hand section is already green and covered with purple crocuses, while in the background the landscape and trees are still covered with snow. The vigorous and powerful movement of the farmer with his wheelbarrow from the bottom right contrasts with the counter-movement of a horse behind him, which is carefully dancing its way down from the top left to the bottom right between patches of snow.

The painting bears Kirchner’s incised monogram in the upper right corner and is stamped on the reverse (upper left) with “E.L. Kirchner Nachlass” (E.L. Kirchner Estate) and inscribed KN-Da/Bc 36 in black brush pen. The verso reveals the earlier, abandoned composition Forest Landscape (1914, Gordon 806v), enriching this masterwork’s art-historical significance and recalling the expressive intensity of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s formative Brücke years.