Paysage rural, Automne 1931, 1931

Lili Erzinger  

Lili Erzinger, born May 9, 1908 in Zurich, and died October 7, 1964 in Neuchâtel, is a Swiss artist, painter and designer.

His work is marked by refined abstraction.

She trained at the age of 16, first at the Art School of La Chaux-de-Fonds then left for Paris in 1929 to take courses in particular at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and at the Académie Ranson until 1936. She studied with André Lhote, Roger Bissière and Fernand Léger with whom she developed her taste for non-figurative painting. He also taught him the importance of drawing as an essential step in plastic construction.

The journeys undertaken by Lili Erzinger are important milestones. She stayed in Riga in 1935 and was inspired by the urban landscape that she represented by reducing it to the essential of its lines. She also works on the background which loses its three-dimensional aspect to become a colored solid.

In 1936, she taught painting and art history in Saint-Louis in the United States and later declared that she had been strongly marked by the intense colors and blacks and the dynamism of the country. The motif of the flame whose silhouette she draws with a sinuous line was inspired by a religious ceremony she attended in Einsiedeln in 1937.

Among Lili Erzinger's artistic affinities and influences, we can cite Vassily Kandinsky, Jean Arp and Sophie Taueber-Arp.

The theoretical ideas of the first inspire his own plastic research. Indeed, the notion of “inner resonance” is a fundamental question of Lili Erzinger's work. She met the Arp couple at the end of the 1930s and following the death of Sophie Taueber, Lili Erzinger went to Jean Arp's studio in Meudon to restore some of his wife's paintings, at the latter's request.

Lili Erzinger settles again and definitively in Switzerland, in Neuchâtel at the start of the Second World War. She presented her works at the exhibitions of the Allianz group in Zurich in 1942, 1947 and 1954 and at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris between 1946 and 1949.

She died on October 7, 1964 in Neuchâtel at the age of 56.