Alois CARIGIET

Alois Carigiet is a prolific Swiss artist, he has been a graphic designer, a painter and a world famous children's book illustrator.
His younger years in the small mountain village of Trun in the canton of Graubünden have influenced him greatly, he aimed for a rural existence throughout his life. When his family moved to Chur in 1911, Carigiet described the move as an "emigration to the low-lands from a mountain boy's paradise to a gloomy apartment in a narrow town alley."
He quit school in 1918 to start an apprenticeship as a decorative designer and draftsman, but spent a lot of his spare time drawing rural and urban scenes, farm animals and pets.
After completed his apprenticeship, Carigiet went to Zurich and worked for Max Dalang's advertisement agency where he learned the techniques of graphic design. He quickly gained public recognition for his work and opened his own studio. In between 1923 and 1939, he created more than a hundred posters: commercial and advertisement posters (his elegant animals for PKZ or Fein-Kaller), tourism posters (as his poster "Holidays in Switzerland" for the ONST in 1938 declined in several languages), educational posters and murals for schools (such as in Inalpe, the ascent to the mountain pasture, in 1934 or the goatherd's departure in 1942, a celebration of the rural life), illustrations and satirical caricatures for the medias.
In 1937, he created a diorama for the Swiss Pavilion at the Paris International World Fair and one of his most important poster in 1939 for the Swiss National Exhibition where the Swiss flag fly above the city of Zurich.
In October 1939, he gave up his business in Zurich and moved into a small farm house without electricity or running water in Platenga, a hamlet in the Graubünden mountains. He wished to dedicate his life to art and observation of the alpine fauna.
After his marriage (1943), Carigiet moved back to Zurich in 1950 where he took up his work as a graphic designer again.
In 1960, Carigiet moved back to the village of his childhood, Trun, where he would spend the rest of his life painting.
Carigiet is also very famous as a children illustrator, especially for the book "A Bell for Ursli" (Uorsin, 1945). The book has been translated into 14 languages and has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide.
Its posters celebrate a Switzerland that is close to nature and he often depicts animals with a touch of humour (Delikatessen, PKZ, Fein-Kaller).