Ficht Tanner with his universe of embroideries in his studio

Photo: © Camille Noé Marcoux, 2025

At the end of the 1970s, Ficht Tanner created his first embroidered works using an Elna sewing machine. Very soon, the self-taught artist realized that the tool was unsuitable: the thread pulled too tightly on the fabric, creating folds and knots. He quickly acquired an old Adler embroidery machine, modified the motor himself, and began using it without formal training.

Since 2008, Ficht Tanner has worked with a Bernina embroidery machine, allowing a much smoother stitching rhythm. From the early 2000s, he began to “embroider intensely” every day with great discipline — “Monday to Friday, from nine to twelve, then from one to five.” In the spring of 2001, he organized a major exhibition in his palace, an event he experienced as a true artistic rebirth.

Described in the Appenzeller Zeitung as a “musician, embroiderer, and philosopher,” Ficht Tanner explained his creative approach:

“What I have embroidered is in fact a conversation with myself. For years I have sat each day at my embroidery machine, without preparatory drawings or intellectual intent, simply following the impulse of the forms that are born spontaneously from the movement of the needle, and which my eyes then discover with wonder. Then I choose the colored threads with which I want to fill them, and finally I carefully embroider the entire background of the fabric in the interlacing of large and tiny forms, with white thread, to hold together the whole of my composition.”

Following a retrospective dedicated to his embroideries at the Museum of Outsider Art in St. Gallen (Open Art Museum) in 2012, the Halle Saint-Pierre Museum in Paris will present six monumental embroideries by Ficht Tanner from September 2025 to July 2026, as part of the group exhibition L’Etoffe des rêves (The Fabric of Dreams).