About

The gallery is named after Hans W. Seelhofer, who collected and exhibited under the name Jean Gauthier. A Bernese lawyer and journalist by profession, he was a collector from childhood: his first purchase, made as a schoolboy at an auction in a Bern antiquary's shop, was an Aberli engraving of the city seen from the north, paid for with a gold coin he had been given at New Year.

In 1955 he bought the old castle at Worb, then close to ruin, and restored it. From 1968 he opened its medieval halls to exhibitions - Hogarth, Steinlen, Heckel and Barlach from his own collection, shown alongside living Swiss painters, sculptors and goldsmiths - with the declared aim of bringing art to people outside the city. Every exhibition was mounted at his own expense, free to enter, with no commission taken on a sale. The shows travelled on to other parts of Switzerland, to Germany, to the People's Republic of China, and to the Salzburg Festival. In 1993 he designed the exhibition marking five hundred years of the Schedel World Chronicle at the Schule für Gestaltung in Bern.

He belonged to the Schweizerische Graphische Gesellschaft for his whole life. Founded in 1917, the society commissions a work from a contemporary Swiss artist each year for a membership it holds to 125.

He wrote that in this field knowledge is everything, and that one should in the end only buy what one actually likes. The gallery continues in that spirit and represents Swiss and international artists, with a focus on contemporary painting, sculpture and works on paper.