For fifty years, Eva Aeppli collected letters, manuscripts, drawings, graphics, and photographs sent to her from her circle of friends, as well as her own materials, in folios that she calls Livres de Vie. In this long period, she thereby created a kind of “Autobiography Without Words”. Because some of her friends were important personages in circles of artists, writers, and scientists, her books of life are also a magnificent and very personal document of European postwar art. Today, the Livres de Vie are in the possession of the Solothurn Art Museum.
Eva Aeppli, an artist born in Zofingen, Switzerland in 1925, has lived in France since the early 1950s. Her marriage to the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely and her studio on the Impasse Ronsin in Paris – across from the workshop of the momentous sculptor Constantin Brancusi – put her in close contact with the avant-garde art scene of her time.
Eva Aeppli always disregarded the artistic trends and fashions and autodidactically creating an independent oeuvre of timeless validity. She began as a painter and, in the 1960s, turned to making figures out of silk, velvet, and cotton textiles, which she sewed in a technique she developed herself. From the beginning, her pictorial world circled the fundamental human themes, the world of the emotions, and death. With numerous colored reproductions, this book provides for the first time an overview of Aeppli’s work: along with the Books of Life, also her drawings, paintings, individual figures, groups of figures, and late bronzes. Eva Aeppli. Les Livres de Vie – The Books of Life is bound in coarse linen, processed by silkscreen printing, and is published to accompany the major exhibition of the same name in the Museum Tinguely in Basel.

Authors: Andres Pardey, André Kamber
Artists: Eva Aeppli

Coarse linen, inscripted by silkscreen
24 x 32 cm
288 pages
224 color- and B/W-illustrations
German
available
ISBN 978-3-936636-78-9
28 Euro
2005