Undefinable, the figure of Eva Aeppli
make her grand debut in France
The Centre Pompidou Metz is showcasing in 2022 the first retrospective of the Swiss artist Eva Aeppli. While the artist was born in the Swiss village of Zofingen on May 2, 1925, the artist quickly moved to Basel to attend the classes of the Steiner school and by participating in cultural events at the Goetheanum with her family.
During the Second World War, she joins the Basel School of Design (Gewerbeschule), where she meets for the first time Jean Tinguely (who just completed his apprenticeship as a decorator). A few years later, the artist gave birth to their first child, Felix Leu, who will become a famous tattoo artist.
But, she will never forget Jean Tinguely... even more after her tragic intern at a psychiatric clinic where she is diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive neuritis triggered by the traumatic experience of war. Both of them come out of this experience, together, and they move together in a dilapidated building of Basel.
At a party Eva meets Daniel Spoerri who will become one of her closest friends with whom she will produce two works: Vive la Mort (1974/1998) and L’Ogre (1981/1986). Quickly afterwards, the couple had their first daughter, Myriam Tinguely. At that time, the couple didn't earned a lot of money, and Eva decided to sew her first dolls and hand puppets.
At the age of two, Myriam, Jean and Eva settle in Montigny-sur-Loing for a few months, then move to a seedy hotel on rue Pierre Leroux in Paris.
In the middle of the 1950s, the artist started of the her most important work, her Books of Life, a real illustrated autobiography unfolding in 15 notebooks (most of them acquired by the Kunstmuseum Solothurn in 2005).
In her notebooks, she developed her first exhibition at the Maurice Hajje gallery in 1954, her move to the Impasse Ronsin in 1955, her divorce with Jean in 1960, her two monographic exhibition at the Handschin gallery in Basel and at the J gallery in Paris in 1965, and so on.
“I like to have beautiful fabrics. [...] And then I don't like oil paint, because it stinks. And it gets your hands dirty. […] And then with the fabric, you only need a corner of the table.”
Since then, the career of Eva mainly focus on those dolls like figures. But how can it be transformed or reshapes by modern and contemporary artists? This was one of the goals of the show, tp put the career of the artist alongside her friends and contemporaries such as:
2015: Eva dies in Honfleur on May 4, at just 90 years old, after dispersing her work.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Centre Pompidou Metz
Date: 7.05.2022 – 14.11.2022
Curators: Chiara Parisi and Anne Horvath
Ticket: Available at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Centre Pompidou Metz
Centre Pompidou Metz
1 Parvis des Droits-de-l'Homme
57 000 Metz
Phone: +33 (0)3 87 15 39 39
Mail: contact@centrepompidou-metz.fr