Eduard Spörri
Born in 1901.
Died in 1995.
Eduard Spörri (21 January 1901–1 July 1995, Wettingen) is known for a body of work centred on figurative sculpture, primarily in bronze, complemented by a substantial group of drawings and reliefs. He also explored art printmaking and jewellery design, secondary yet documented aspects of his practice.
Born into a family of gravestone makers—his father Eduard was a stonemason and his mother was Paulina Schibli—he began with an apprenticeship in his father’s workshop before completing his training with Turo Rossi in Locarno and studying at the schools of applied arts in Zurich (1917–1919) and Munich (school of applied arts and academy of fine arts, 1921–1923), where he developed his style under Adolf von Hildebrand and Wilhelm Lehmbruck. On returning to Switzerland, he took over his father’s business in 1924 but gradually turned towards artistic work; civil records list him as married to Rosa Elise Bachofner in 1929. Federal grants enabled him to undertake study stays in Rome and Naples (1929) and Paris (1931), where, according to the source, he met Aristide Maillol and Auguste Rodin.
His work consists primarily of figures, portraits and reliefs: most of his sculptures are made in bronze and form part of a figurative practice supported by a substantial body of preparatory drawings. The range of media—sculpture, drawing, printmaking and jewellery—attests to a technical versatility documented in the records consulted. A significant number of works (estimated at around one hundred in public spaces, mainly in the canton of Aargau) testify to the enduring presence of his creations beyond purely museum settings.
The Eduard Spörri Foundation, established in 1995, led to the opening of a museum devoted to his work in Wettingen in 2008. The museum combines indoor and outdoor displays around a Skulpturenplatz and a Themenweg (Ängeliweg) linking the cloister to the museum site. The Kunst Museum / Museum Eduard Spörri explicitly connects Spörri’s legacy with contemporary practice presented indoors and outdoors.
For further documentation, readers may consult the bibliographic references cited (DBAS, vol. 2; P. Meier, Eduard Spörri, 2001) and the SIKART entry (identifier 4001640).
