Eva Aeppli

Eva Aeppli, who died in 2015, left a multi-layered oeuvre that was produced throughout the second half of the twentieth century and focuses on figures in various media. Aeppli made her thin figures, which often lack individuality, with charcoal on paper, oil on canvas, or she embroidered them with cotton or woolen thread on silk. Since the early phase of her work, she also made fabric sculptures, which she showed in groups and as installations. The work presented here, Bella (1970), was originally part of a group of thirty figures, exhibited in 1970 and 1971 in France, Switzerland, and Germany. Part of the group was then used in the tree-high collective sculpture Le Cyclop (1969 – 94), which was initiated by Aeppli’s first husband Jean Tinguely and others in a forest near Milly-la-Foret south of Paris.

Thematically these works address large somber themes such as death and existential human crises, but they also refer to political events like the horrors of war and the industrialized murder of the Shoah. Aeppli is not seen as a member of the Fantastic Realists, but she is a contemporary of them whose approach to art permits viewing her work in this context. Her works do not address religious or mythical themes in general, but rather connects with them via questions regarding existential crises. The psychological depths that take hold of the individual in wartime and as a consequence of war are seen in both Aeppli’s work and in the work of the Fantastic Realists. Their approaches are not identical, but certainly comparable. Unlike the international surrealists, the Fantastic Realists are not only aiming for a theoretical debate on the nature of the picture as a depiction of reality, brought about by painting, but also look specifically at the state of the world in the early postwar years, when everything seems to be out of joint and thus also absurd and grotesque. This world theater is also seen in a dark form in the work of Aeppli. Her lone and isolated thin figures look starved, with formal idioms that may remind observers of the work of Giacometti, but they also have their own artistic autonomy that makes them of interest to us today. Aeppli’s friend and artist colleague Daniel Spoerri describes the artist and her work as follows: ​“Eva Aeppli is the most consistent, unswerving, and loud artist I have ever met, and this includes not just women artists but also men. Guided only by her own magnetic needle, she was able to begin to paint in 1960, in a context where no one was painting (any longer). […] In her oeuvre, particularly since she has begun to cast fabric figures in metal, she gains an independence that is unique in sculpture today.”¹

The Fantastic Realists also faced a similar problem concerning figuration in painting, even if in the beginning abstract painting was still at the forefront of their work.

In more recent reception, the work of Eva Aeppli was featured in an exciting manner in Mike Kelly’s The Uncanny. For this project at Tate Liverpool and at mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (both 2004), the US-American artist brought together objects from popular culture that had elements of the uncanny. According to the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, the ​“uncanny” is not a merely aesthetic category, but a hidden and familiar thing that has been repressed and then re-emerges.

The works of Eva Aeppli can be seen in a similar sense within the context of this exhibition, and this also creates a bridge to the Vienna school of Fantastic Realism.


 

1. Daniel Spoerri, ​“Eva Aeppli,” in Eva Aeppli. Bilder 1960 – 1964, exh. cat. Galerie Littmann, Basel 1985.