Description
Ignaz Epper (1892–1969)
Swiss artist, at 18 he studied to become an embroidery designer for a firm of St. Gallen. Starting from 1913, he devoted himself exclusively to art and lived in Weimar and Monaco of Bavaria. He specialized in lithography and especially in the woodcut, a technique that gave him an international reputation and a way to express himself. In the years of the First World War, his artistic fame increased thanks to the collaboration with the art dealer Coray in Zurich. In Zurich galleries, he exhibited his unique expressionist woodcuts, works marked by the terrible experience of war. He settled in Zurich, where he met and attended important artists and writers. He made several trips around Europe and in 1932 he decided to go and live in Ascona (Ticino) with his wife Mischa. Ascona became his home. Here he continued his work and open to other techniques, such as oil, watercolor and drawing, creating sharp landscapes and paintings of mystical content. He continued its stylistic investigation in the Swiss Expressionism, developing the themes of suffering and violence. As a memory of his work, in 1979 the “Foundation and Mischa Ignaz Epper” was created, whose aims are to preserve, exhibit and publish oils, watercolors, drawings, woodcuts and sculptures by Ignaz and Mischa Epper.
