Dominique Appia

A self-taught Genevan painter, Dominique Appia (born 29 July 1926 in Geneva, died 8 January 2017 in Geneva) worked predominantly in structured acrylic painting, evoking dreamlike and at times unusual worlds.

Born into an upper-middle-class milieu — the son of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother — he held various jobs between the ages of twenty and twenty-five (hotel porter, taxi driver), then trained in photographic retouching and printing before working for fifteen years as a draughtsman in an architectural practice. Self-taught, he began his artistic career at around the age of forty.

His output includes numerous wall decorations in public and private buildings, and he was notably responsible for the ceiling of Geneva’s Victoria Hall. In the civic sphere, he also designed a poster in 1982 for the vote concerning the project affecting the Promenade de l'Observatoire in Geneva.

His solo exhibitions include Galerie Aurora, Geneva (1971, 1973); Galerie du Port, Rolle (1974); Galerie Bernard Letu, Geneva (1977); Swiss Center Gallery, New York (1981); Galerie AREA, Paris (1998); and Le Manoir, Cologny (2006). He is represented in the Fonds municipal d'art contemporain de la Ville de Genève (FMAC), which holds two works, and participated in the Exposition des peintres genevois at the Musée Rath in 1979.

The bibliography includes a 1985 monograph (texts by Hubert Monteilhet and Jean Dethier) and a work by Théodore Blaise (1987), while a feature-length documentary, Appia, mémoires d'une œuvre by Nasser Bakhti, was released in 2015. In terms of distinctions, the records list several prizes: Prix Calame (1970, 1972), Prix Harvey (1970, 1974), and the Grand Prix de l'affiche française (1979).