Der Hexerich

Material

Installation with electric motor and mask; 120 x 47 cm

Dating

1991

About the artwork

‘Der Hexerich’, or ‘the wizard’ in English, is the product of a collaboration between the two artists Eva Aeppli and Jean Tinguely from 1991. Aeppli and Tinguely had met in 1943 at the Basel Art School and got married in 1951. They produced numerous works together while they were married, but after their separation in 1960 it took them 40 years before they collaborated again. At first, Tinguely had created the kinetic sculpture shown here by just by himself, but later he asked Eva Aeppli to complement the work with one of her characteristic silk heads.
Aeppli’s images and figures are compelling and if the beholder engages with them, he or she will discover a gruesome-beautiful, abysmal-humoristic cosmos, in which vile bodies come to the fore. The rather gloomy motives in her work – skeletons, dull and lonely shapes, mute faces – point to the shortfalls of our existence and provoke, at times, almost physical pain. The Holocaust was a deep traumatic caesura in Aeppli’s life, an experience which shaped her work significantly. Between 1939 and 1945 the Aeppli family had hidden three Jewish children from the Nazi. Her brother would later comment: “We knew about the spread of Nazism, the prosecution of Jewish people and the suppression of art. That this experience of fear and terror would affect Eva, the most sensitive among us, most strongly, could be anticipated”.
Still, Aeppli was able to circumvent wicked powers. Humour undermines horror and death and suddenly the scenery tips over into a artful ‘danse macabre’. The power of silence rises and the art works become memorials against darkness, humiliation and the evil.
Aeppli’s work can be divided roughly into four categories that follow each other chronologically: drawings, large-scale oil paintings, figures and heads made of textiles or bronze. The artist was often mocked for her textile works, which were seen as the use of a disdained technique in fine art. Yet, Aeppli could not be dissuaded and improved the design of the silk heads with time, infusing her faces with ever growing detail and mimicry. This becomes especially apparent in the work shown here.
Aeppli´s sombre and depressing works constitute an interesting counter-narrative to Tinguely´s quite playful, kinetic constructions. Yet, what these collaborative projects evidence is the mutual influence the two artists would have on the other’s work. Aeppli’s head turns the entire construction into an uncanny appearance, which reminds us of Tinguely’s coming to terms with the subject of concentration camps in his series entitled ‘Mengele – dance of the dead’. That series had been a collaborative project with the Swiss iron sculptor Bernhard Luginbühl. Much like Aeppli would do, Luginbühl added sculls to Tinguely´s works, though this time it was animal sculls. The interventions made by his fellow artists made Tinguely’s otherwise rather cheerful and childlike oeuvre appear in a new, more sombre light.

About the artist

Jean Tinguely is considered one of the most successful and most prominent Swiss artists and is best known for his kinetic constructions. Together with Yves Klein he was one of founders of the Paris based artists’ collective Nouveaux Réalistes.
Tinguely’s work consists of an interplay of classic, geometric-abstract forms and Dadaist-baroque exuberance and is rooted in Constructivism and Bauhaus.
His interest in technical high-efficiency machines explains the drive behind his work – the mechanical and aesthetic realisation of motion sequences. The interplay of expressivity and motion and the deeper meaning behind the moving objects and the materials are most important to his work. These were the key factors, that led to Tinguely’s huge success, not only among skilled art connoisseurs but also among a broad audience.