Peter Stein (born 1922) lives and works in Muri near Bern. Since the end of the 1950s, he has created a very independent oeuvre of painting and printmaking, which occupies an almost unique position in Switzerland. The exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zug - the artist's second in ten years - uses excellent examples to bridge the gap between his earliest works from 1957 and his most recent works. However, this is deliberately not a retrospective. Rather, care was taken to emphasize historical aspects on the one hand, but also to design spatial presentations on the other hand, which characterize certain "climate" (stone). For example, an entire room is dedicated to the color yellow, another to blue. The exhibition also contains around fifty engravings, examples of an independent work equivalent to painting from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Bern (which owns all of Stein's prints).

If one wants to locate Stein's oeuvre historically, one could place it in the early 1960s. Thanks in particular to Arnold Rüdlinger's groundbreaking exhibitions in Bern, the painter, who had acquired solid craftsmanship as a pupil of von Mühlenen, became acquainted with works by the Americans Newman, Rothko and Francis, who were to impress throughout his life. But he also has a lot in common with the specifically European development of painting in the wider environment of Zero. Stein strove to open up non-representational painting from the rational one-sidedness of concrete art as well as from the emotional one-sidedness of Tachism. For all his (increasing) freedom of brushwork, his painting is based on a conceptual foundation. Without depicting them directly, his work is nevertheless related to nature. Their transitory nature is a metaphor of life for him. In this way, he tries to "hold on to the fugitive and at the same time let it flee" (Stein). Always surprisingly, the work cyclically revolves around this paradoxical theme, whereby it seems to become more and more 'younger' and fresher as the artist ages. Stein is not only a master of colour, but also of copperplate engraving, a medium to whose rediscovery he made a significant contribution early on. Here, he strives to wrest lightness and atmosphere from the brittleness and hardness of the material thanks to the stupendous precision of the finest lineaments. Without imitating each other, painting and graphics are in dialogue. The exhibition aims to present Peter Stein's quiet but profound oeuvre as an important part of the recent history of Swiss art. She is also the author of a series on international conceptual art (Bonfanti, Calderara, Wittner, Spagnulo, Girke and Gappmayr).

A publication and a catalogue raisonné of intaglio prints have been published; the publication is also available as a special edition with a drawing by the artist.