Alois Kuperion – Painting is My Purpose in Life

With works by
Alois Kuperion

Curated by
Ursula Schnitzer

Merano: on occasion of the 50th anniversary of the death of Alois Kuperion - he passed away on January 17, 1966 - , Merano Arte will hold a large retrospective of the life and works of the wandering painter from the Vinschgau from October 10, 2015 to January 10, 2016. In his honor, the cultural department of the Merano municipality has published a comprehensive monograph with the latest biographical details, roughly 100 color illustrations, and numerous historical portrait photographs.

After having spent his childhood and youth in the Vinschgau and then in Austria, Kuperion (1891–1966) returned to South Tyrol after World War II. He spent a number of years in Kastelbell, but in the 1950s, Merano became his adoptive home.
During the 1950s, Kuperion succeeded in independently developing an abstract style of painting. With his sense of color, his intuition, and his airiness, he surpassed many contemporary painters who made great efforts to overcome representationalism, and he influenced a whole row of domestic artists. 
"His work is a rarity in the history of painting" (Antonio Manfredi, 1954), and it goes to show how a loner without a large cultural or intellectual burden - Kuperion was a simple agricultural worker - was able to develop a dense world of color in a high quality in the remote Vinschgau, purely from his inner drive and passion. Following the last comprehensive show in Latsch and Bolzano in 1988, and picking up the threads of his first exhibition in 1961 in the Merano Kurverwaltung, this exhibition is intended to once again introduce Kuperion to the interested public.

Thanks to the support of 40 private lenders, we have succeeded in compiling more than 100 of his best works for the exhibition. All in all, his oeuvre probably comprised roughly 1,500 small-format pictures. 500 to 600 are now privately owned in South Tyrol, hundreds were cast away, and many probably belong to families who have kept them as souvenirs of their holidays the and promenades of Merano.

This exhibition is not presented according to a chronological or technological order; instead, we have tried to make Kuperion's spontaneous advancement towards abstraction as well as his formal and chromatic intuition visible on the basis of various groups of works. Color, surface, composition, the blending of techniques, and the structure of the pictures bear witness to his virtuous and spontaneous fantasy. The color combinations of the pictures are surprising, and they result in assertive works of art. In a carefree manner, he consolidated the many isms and avant-garde movements of the first half of the 20th century in a personal style of painting. 
In Merano, Kuperion found 'art lovers' and was able to fully dedicate himself to painting. In 1955, he wrote: "Art, painting was my prime purpose in life." In Merano, if only at times, his dream of being an artist and no longer a simple farm hand, did come true. Yet, even here, alcohol and poverty drove him toward loneliness. His placement in Merano old-age home in Gampenstrasse in 1962 set an early end to his career as an artist. Kuperion died in Merano on January 17, 1966.