Luoghi e Sguardi

from 9 April to 30 October 2022

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”.