On Saturday, 9th April the Fondazione Ignaz and Mischa Epper officially inaugurated the new location and the exhibition “Ignaz Epper – Luoghi e Sguardi”
Fondazione Epper is in Via Carrà dei Nasi in the charming village of Ascona, in a historic patrician house formerly home to the Rolf Gérard Foundation.
Epper was born in San Gallo on 6 July 1892. He trained as a designer and embroiderer from 1908 to 1912. He worked as a freelance artist in Weimar and Munich from 1913 onwards. During this time he made his first wood carvings and lithographs. Between 1916 and 1917 he met Han Coray and Fritz Pauli. He married Mischa Quarles van Ufford in 1919.
Epper was born in Bloemendaal (the Netherlands) on 18 August 1901. She moved to Zurich in 1918, where she met Han Coray, Fritz Pauli and Ignaz Epper, whom she married in 1919. In 1922 she attended dance lessons in Dresden with Mary Wigman. It was here that she met Hermann Haller.
The non-profit Foundation seeks to preserve, curare and curate and make publicly , available the artworks of Ignaz Epper and Mischa Epper.
The exhibition- entitled “Luoghi e sguardi”, or “Places and views”- commences upon entering the new headquarters of the Epper Foundation and continues throughout three rooms, allowing visitors to trace the development of a journey that involves the essential features of the artist’s body of work. It opens with the acclaimed 1921 oil painting Paar am Tisch to proceed with a series of interiors, portraits, and self-portraits, examining the world of social relations and external, human, and panoramic reality. There are even affecting traces of the sights of the lake, of Ascona, and of villages in the Locarno area in a sophisticated series of watercolours in which the artist underscores his deep and affectionate relationship with the places in which he chose to spend the better part of his life.
The watercolours represent one of the most serene periods in Epper’s body of work, a kind of reciprocal gift between the artist and the Locarno area. They also underlined that he found consolation in the Ascona landscape amid his complex, pessimistic vision of human experience. His stay there (a punctual return from time spent travelling and living abroad) was gladdened by the human and panoramic dimension that he found in this landscape he so loved. His gaze rested on nature and places- and particularly on Ascona, seen from on high- with a touch of subtle poetry. Thus, in the work of Ignaz Epper we can see an intrinsic strength insufficiently acknowledged- even more so in tormented times such as those we are living. A strength emblematically defined by Harold Szeeman as the “desire to give more peace to the world through the art of his tormented soul”.
The building is described as a “reflective” and cultural “annex” to the adjacent Hotel.
On Saturday, 9 April, the new headquarters of the Epper Foundation, in the historic patrician palace in the heart of Ascona’s Borgo, was presented…
On Saturday, 9th April the Fondazione Ignaz and Mischa Epper will officially inaugurate the new location and exhibition
Ignaz Epper’s works are on display at the temporary exhibition Eyes on Ticino at the Casorella Museum until April 18.
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The Ignaz and Mischa Epper Foundation
Via Carrà dei Nasi 1
6612 Ascona
Tel: 091-7911942
info@fondazioneepper.ch
The Ignaz and Mischa Epper Foundation
Via Carrà dei Nasi 1
6612 Ascona
Tel: 091-7911942
info@fondazioneepper.ch