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Grażyna Kulczyk Has Spent 50 Years Collecting Artists Who Were Difficult to Place

The founder of Muzeum Susch believes securing visibility for women artists is of paramount importance, and the institution operates at the forefront of some of the art world's most pressing gender questions.

Muzeum Susch is situated hours from Zurich in the Engadin Valley of the Swiss Alps: a rural region in a sequestered mountain location. The site re-occupies a 12th-century monastery that later became a brewery, and the discreet white architecture reflects a singular sense of place rooted in local geology. Approximately 10,000 tonnes of rock were excavated from the mountainside behind the buildings. Some interior galleries sit deep inside that excavation with walls of visibly exposed rock, and museumgoers can hear water moving through the mountain. “Visitors descend, climb, pass through narrow corridors and suddenly enter tall, light-filled rooms. The architecture encourages close looking, and that rhythm fundamentally shapes the encounter with the artworks,” collector Grażyna Kulczyk, the museum’s founder, tells Observer.

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(In the introduction to a publication about the venue, Muzeum Susch: Alpine Laboratory, art critic and editor Jennifer Higgie wrote: “That Muzeum Susch has gallery spaces hewn from stone is symbolic on many levels: it embodies the idea that art history is no longer fixed but mutable and that women are literally and metaphorically breaking down the walls that, for far too long, have confined them.”)

"Muzeum Susch" Address: Sur Punt 78, 7542 Susch, Switzerland Contact: info@muzeumsusch.ch Highlights: In addition to exhibitions, the museum hosts experimental presentations, performances, conferences, lectures, events and an interdisciplinary residency program.

The Muzeum Susch—”a name like a sigh,” writes Paweł Goźliński—opened in December of 2018, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of Poland gaining independence as a salute to Kulczyk’s place of birth. From the beginning, the museum was conceived not only as a site for exhibitions but also for international collaborations, publishing, residencies and research at the in-house Instituto........

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