Whilst art is often a solitary pursuit, artists relish and nurture the company of others. Inspiration is infectious, flowing and bubbling through the exchange of ideas, perspectives, and the opaque drama of human interaction. This exhibition captures a period in the late 1960s when Carona became a waystation on the journeys of a disparate collection of creative wanderers.
David Weiss Press Release: The Dream of Casa Aprile
MASI Lugano presents “David Weiss. Il sogno di Casa Aprile. Carona 1968-1978“. For the first time, the exhibition, which presents more than two hundred rarely exhibited works from public and private archives, traces the history of the artistic community that came into being in Casa Aprile in Carona: a charmed setting in which the young David Weiss – future half of the famed duo Fischli / Weiss – experienced art as an everyday practice, shared dream and act of community.
Carona, a small village in the Canton of Ticino between Lake Lugano and Monte San Salvatore, had been attracting and offering hospitality to artists, writers and politically engaged figures since the early twentieth century. In the late sixties and early seventies, Casa Aprile – which was bought by Meret Oppenheim and her brother Burkhard Wenger (née Oppenheim), and then entrusted to her nephew Christoph Wenger – became the setting for a series of significant international artistic encounters, out of which deep-seated connections formed.
One of the artists involved in this vibrant scene was David Weiss (Zurich, 1946–2012). Weiss spent his time as a guest in Casa Aprile drawing, recording and observing. Around him, the animated community that formed included like-minded figures such as Esther Altorfer, Anton Bruhin, Maria Gregor, Matthyas Jenny, Urs Lüthi, Penelope Margaret Macworth-Praed, Iwan Schumacher, Peter Schweri and Willy Spiller. The exhibition in MASI evokes the carefree, irreverent, community spirit of this collective workshop, in a rich selection of documentary materials, albums, books, letters, photographs, sound recordings, diaries and drawings by the artists invited to stay in Casa Aprile. It also takes a fresh look at the early visual art of David Weiss. The drawings and sketches he produced in that period exhibit early signs of the surreal humour, psychedelic lines and poetic vision of everyday life that went on to characterise his later work as part of the renowned duo Fischli/ Weiss.
“Carona was not a school or a movement,” observes Tobia Bezzola, Director of MASI Lugano, “but a fleeting constellation of creative lives, people who shared a desire to explore new approaches to art and life. For Weiss, it was a time of silent growth, observation, drawing and dreaming, which now affords us a glimpse of the lost paradise lauded by Meret Oppenheim in 1967.”
The exhibition
Though rooted in that specific setting, the art produced in Carona challenges the dividing line between centre and margins, urban landscape and natural idyll, solemnity and playfulness, solitude and community. Starting from this standpoint, the exhibition in MASI opens by exploring the cultural milieu that characterised this particular period of history in Carona: the people who spent time there, and the family ties and ongoing connections that formed in the Ticino village involved a number of illustrious figures, including Hermann Hesse, who described the landscape in his texts and watercolours, as a setting for reflection and healing.
The exhibition also includes a priceless series of drawings and paintings by the famous Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim, who, together with her brother Burkhard Wenger, bought Casa Aprile in 1969. These works illustrate the point of encounter between the historical village of Carona and the experimental artistic community that gathered there.
The exhibition goes on to document the early urban experiments of David Weiss and his arrival at Casa Aprile, when its collective creative microcosm was coming into being. At this period in his life his work was dominated by drawing and poetic reflections on the landscape as a space of memory, imagination and everyday life.
Berge vor Agnuzzo (Tessin), 1937
From 1968 onwards, Weiss often left Zurich to spend long periods in the Ticino village. Yet the city did not disappear from his creative imagination, merely retreating into the background, like an echo. In his works and those of his contemporaries — Anton Bruhin, Peter Schweri, Iwan Schumacher and Willy Spiller — artificial lights, recorded sounds and architectural details resurface: fragments of city life transported into the peace and quiet of Carona, where they were reworked with a different eye.
Weiss’s practice of this period already exhibited the surreal humour, and fragmentary, poetic narration that went on to inform the transformative spirit of his partnership with Peter Fischli. The works on display in MASI include the original drawings for the famous artist’s book up and down town, also known as “Regenbüchlein” (Little Rain Book). It is part of the Wandlungen (Metamorphoses) series, a collection of graphic metamorphoses and free associations he developed from 1975, in Marrakech, Carona and Zurich. In these drawings, the uninterrupted flow of images, a chain of uncontrolled causes and effects, recalls the narrative structure of the famous children’s book Joggeli söll ga Birli schüttle! (Joggeli should go shake the pear tree!) by Lisa Wenger (1908), which is also on show.
Also featured in the exhibition is Lazy Days (1974), a collaborative project between Weiss and the artist Urs Lüthi; Willy Spiller’s photographs, and the recording of the sounds of Carona entitled Carona Soundscape 18.3.76, by Anton Bruhin. Along with drawing, independent publishing was another activity that characterised the practices of community-building and anti-conformism embraced in Carona, and the show features several issues of the magazine/autobiography Nachtmaschine (Night machine) by Matthyas Jenny, printed in Carona between 1976 and 1978. An energy akin to Jenny’s versatile spirit can also be seen in the work of David Weiss, whose drawings were not just on art paper, but also inhabited jotters, heftli (booklets) and comix.
“Drawing, in conjunction with publishing, thus became a daily practice for Weiss, an intimate, personal act and a space of freedom, capable of generating forms, stories and associations not hindered by any established framework. In Carona, this approach found fertile ground: a community in which drawing, printing, photocopying and storytelling were not separate actions, but gestures characterising a collective, poetic lifestyle”, highlights Virginia Marano, co-curator of the exhibition.
David Weiss
The Dream of Casa Aprile
Carona 1968 – 1978
28 september 2025 – 1 february2026
Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana / MASI, Lugano
Curated by Tobia Bezzola and Virginia Marano, in collaboration with The Estate of David Weiss
Images courtesy of MASI Lugano / The Estate of David Weiss
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
