Fears from back then, images from today

A giant with a moustache is holding a shattered snake in his hands. There are dwarves, a little hearse, a sleeping woman in a white dress – perhaps Snow White? Anyone looking at Nando von Arb’s drawings without any context encounters an eerily beautiful world that seems strangely familiar.

‘Schillernde Blasen’ is the title of the exhibition at Galerie Litar, for which the comic artist Nando von Arb has drawn inspiration from Friedrich Glauser’s autobiographical text ‘Damals in Wien’. Glauser wrote it shortly before his death in 1938. In it, he returns to Vienna, where he was born in 1896 and spent his early years. His mother died when he was just four years old. His father became a domineering figure. In between, memories surface – dazzling and elusive.

Christa Baumberger, director of Litar, has been studying Glauser for many years. Through a collaboration with the Wien Museum, she rediscovered his little-known early years. ‘It’s very much about fear, but also about memory. How do you return to your childhood after thirty years, and what memories surface in the process?” Glauser describes this feeling in such powerful imagery, “that I thought: this also applies to our present day, which is likewise strongly shaped by fears.”

That’s how Nando von Arb came into the picture. In his graphic novel *Learning to Fear*, he explores his own childhood fears and those of his generation. He had never heard of Glauser before. ‘Sometimes that’s the best starting point’, says Baumberger. She sent him *Damals in Wien*, showed him the small room at the Litar and gave him free rein: “You can paint straight onto the wall; you can do whatever you like. Just let this text inspire you.” This resulted in the six drawings featured in the exhibition.

Von Arb took from the text whatever stuck with him. For a while, he tried to draw Glauser’s face from a photograph. Then he gave up. He became less and less interested in what Friedrich Glauser had actually looked like. Far more fascinating were the images that sprang to mind as he read.

The main image of the exhibition shows little Friedrich in the midst of a strange family machine. His father and mother tower above him; their bodies pass through him and he through them. ‘It goes both ways’, says Baumberger. “You pass through your parents and they pass through you.” There is something organic, almost symbiotic, about this family, and at the same time something of a pressure cooker. The parents nourish the child, yet the pressure rises just as much. ‘The pressure in your head just keeps rising and rising and rising’, says Baumberger. Until, at some point, it explodes. ‘The way Nando captures this symbiosis, this explosive energy within this family in a single image, is simply magnificent.’

And suddenly you understand the dwarves, the snake, the giant and the sleeping woman in the white dress in a slightly different light. For Litar, this raises yet another question. How do you exhibit literature? “Literature is something intangible”, says Christa Baumberger. “It takes place in the reader’s mind. How do you manage to turn it into a sensory experience the moment you enter a room?”

Literature has been on display at Litar since 2021. The gallery opened back then in a former painter’s workshop in Kreis 6 – with Glauser, of all people. For the first exhibition, ‘Friedrich Glauser’s Cell’, a small space within a space was created in collaboration with the Zurich-based design studio Klauser Lienhard, and this is still used today for changing exhibitions. The idea, Baumberger explains, was at the time ‘born out of necessity to some extent’. This was because they opened in the midst of the pandemic, when exhibitions were barely accessible to the public.

Five years on, Glauser is back. And thanks to an audio guide, visitors can listen to ‘Back Then in Vienna’ whilst viewing von Arb’s drawings. The images do not directly accompany the text. Rather, they draw you back to him. You look differently, listen differently, and perhaps linger on a character you would have skipped over whilst reading. And even if you thought you’d known Glauser for a long time, this small exhibition shows that there is still plenty to discover.

Dazzling Bubbles
until 5 December 2026 | Galerie Litar, Zurich