Leu Art Family

The Leu family is famous in the tattooing world. Felix, the son of Eva Aeppli, who was Jean Tinguely’s first wife, and Loretta Leu, made their living off their art traveling around the world with their children, Ama, Aia, Filip, and Ajja during the end of the 1960s and 70s. These years of traveling were fed by an artistic curiosity and, above all, gave shape to a familial cosmos. This exhibition, which will be open to the public from March 3 to October 31, 2021 at Museum Tinguely in Basel, was born out of the desire to present this cosmos through the artistic creations of all the members of this tribe.

Homebodies today, vagabonds yesterday, but always inhabitants of their own universe, weaving together thousands of artistic explorations. Loretta and Felix met in New York in 1967, at the opening of a Tinguely exhibition. They collaborated with Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle on the realisation of their monumental sculpture for the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montréal. And then they got on the road… Three generations speak to each other at Museum Tinguely’s exhibition: Felix and Loretta Leu; Filip and Titine Leu; Ama, Doug, Summer and Poppy Leu-Wilson; Aia, Steve, Fayet and India Leu-Allin; Ajja and Tanya Leu; Jane Leu Rekas; Miriam Tinguely; Rolf Kesselring; Cajun Leu and Chloé Liberge; and Cressa McLaren.

The exhibition
The first room is black as night where the second is sensuous, surging, and luminous. Two galleries like the yin and yang, lunar and solar… The darkness reveals the first moves. Phantasm of the first trace, in prehistoric caves. The first dances, the first trances, by torchlight, in these stone bellies, belly of the earth. The first artistic traces of humanity are drawings. Drawing is also the first thing a child does, before it starts to speak. In this first part, carried by the darkness, an ocean of sketches echoes an electronic pulsar. We can think of Malcolm Lowry, who, legend has it, wrote his book Under the Volcano three times… Drifting pages.

The second space is celestial, like the sky that holds all the stars. This cosmos is presented as a total work of art. It is the sky of the Leu Art Family: attempting to reveal a universe, a philosophy, and a conception of the world, a Weltanschauung, using exclusively the numerous pictorial presences of each and every one. The walls disappear, invaded by the works of 20 members of the tribe. The desire for intoxication, of an overflow, desire to construct a mirror image of the generosity of being part of this great family. Here, everyone will find their star…

“Childhood is constructed thus: first and foremost, in the mother’s womb, its first envelope. And then the child, having ‘entered’ the world, constructs a sort of bubble around itself that I imagine as the limits of its perception, but above all as the construction of its own world. I believe this is how the child grows up, with its own universe, up until the age of eight or nine when the bubble bursts in the name of socialisation and schooling, in the name of a norm, of a codification, of a standard practice. And so, adults pass their whole lives lost in a world not of their own making, attempting to shroud themselves in masks or armour. It is not childhood we lose, but rather the capacity to build a world to our own specifications, a world in which we can create, mature, relax, accommodate… Welcome to the world of the Leu Art Family!”

Christian Jelk, exhibition curator

Publication
The show is accompanied by the book Leu Art Family authored by the exhibition curator. (320pp, French, German, English, ISBN 978-2-9701291-10, edition Ogive, available at the museum shop)