Lika Nüssli: Für die Katz. All for Nothing

In October of 2025, on the occasion of the publication of Robert Walser’s complete feuilletons in Suhrkamp Verlag’s Bern Edition, the Robert Walser Center premiered an exhibition of work by Lika Nüssli called Für die Katz [“For the Cat” or “All for Nothing”]. Nüssli took her inspiration from the nearly one thousand feuilletons that Walser wrote for newspapers and magazines between 1898 and 1933—texts on animals and people, cities and landscapes, art and life, dreams and observations, or, in short, anything and everything.

Nüssli read through this large body of work, following her intuitions. A sentence, an image, or a mood would call up painterly impulses, resulting in watercolors, drawings, and sequences of images. The artworks in this volume came out of this powerful encounter between reading and seeing, between the literary and the pictorial imagination. The numbers on each picture refer to the numbering of the corresponding text in the Bern Edition.

Writing and drawing were closely interconnected for Walser himself, and visual art played an important role for him and those close to him. His brother Karl Walser, for instance, an important influence on Robert in their early years, was one of the most successful Swiss painters of his time. Both Robert and Karl moved freely between word and image, observation and composition, sketch and anecdote. Robert Walser’s texts often present clearly drawn scenes; Nüssli’s pictures respond with their own stories, perspectives, and transformations. She writes: “I feel like I’ve known Robert Walser my whole life. When I was young, my sister used to read his books. I went to see a play of his in Herisau with my mother. In college, I was fascinated by the microscripts, which made me feel simultaneously sad and moved to create. His writings are so quick and nimble and utterly contemporary! Full of wonderful irony and audacious winks to the reader. His seductive openness somehow passes right through me and creates shapes and colors on paper. His stories inspire me to spin them farther, twist them around, extend them into fluidity. It feels to me like the time and space between him, his work, and me is transformed into a little nothingness. Drawing, for me, means thinking carefully about something, observing the world, and giving it a shape, as a suggestion, an offering for others. To compose something means to make a statement. I trust the moment and react instinctively, by association, and then I take whatever comes out and push it farther.”

And so a unique dialogue emerges, crossing boundaries of time, medium, and generation. Walser’s feuilletons encounter Lika Nüssli’s images and show how alive and present, how surprising, these texts originally written for the passing moment continue to be.

—Reto Sorg (translated by Damion Searls)

Published with the generous support of Margrit and Hans, Kulturförderung Appenzell Ausserrhoden, Kultur St.Gallen Plus, Stiftung für Ostschweizer Kunstschaffen, Stadt St.Gallen Kulturförderung and Robert Walser Center.