“Une aspiration de l’âme vers la lumière” Yoki and the Art of Contemporary Stained Glass

Yoki (Émile Aebischer, 1922-2012) was a versatile artist who worked in a variety of fields, from easel painting to stained glass, mosaics, tapestry and marquetry. He had a lasting influence on the cultural heritage of Switzerland and abroad. Yoki began his career as a painter of stained glass in the early 1940s. First with small-scale stained glass windows, later with larger-scale works, he developed into one of the most emblematic glass artists of the second half of the 20th century, receiving commissions throughout Switzerland as well as in France, Italy, Germany and Israel. The result is a vast corpus of over a 1,000 figurative and abstract stained-glass windows in both civil and religious buildings.

Funded by the Association des Amis de Yoki, this four-year research project will study Yoki’s religious and secular stained glass windows in public spaces. The project will showcase this significant artistic legacy by compiling an inventory of the artist’s work in stained glass. These records will be published on the vitrosearch database, together with professional photographs of the windows. This inventory will coincide with an academic publication devoted to Yoki’s stained glass work, situating it within the landscape of contemporary art and stained glass alongside a cross-disciplinary reading of the themes and issues surrounding and conditioning his work (including: perception of the art of stained glass, its relationship to the sacred, figuration/abstraction, integration of the work into a monumental setting, interdisciplinarity, the artist’s collaboration with the master glassmaker who produced the work, materiality and techniques).

Project duration: 2023 – 2027