From 1969, Swiss artist Margrit Jäggli began producing “Spiegelbilder” (mirror pictures) in the style of hyperrealism, where photographs of the mirrored human figure serve as models for the artist. These works are uncompromisingly truthful in their portrayal of whichever pose the model may unwittingly have struck in front of the camera. She further characterised them as representing a form of “psychological realism”.
Margrit Jäggli prepared the materials for her mirror pictures in collaboration with her “models”. From several photographs, she would choose one that seemed to typify the subject and used it as the basis for her work. She prepared drawings before painting a life-size image on canvas or Pavatex in acrylic colours that were carefully applied to give a smooth surface, showing the model’s likeness as accurately as possible. This painted figure was then cut out, mounted behind mirror glass and hung in a frame. The mirror surface of these works reflects the surroundings of the viewer and the picture itself, which are thus actively incorporated into the image as a “working” background to the portrait.
Artist friends such as Meret Oppenheim, Manon (Rosmarie Küng), Otto Tschumi and Christian Megert, as well as lesser-known figures, posed for the Bernese artist. They were photographed by Margrit Jäggli while looking at their own reflection and were then painted. Some of them appear shy and reserved, while the poses of others capture uninhibited self-dramatisation.
Meret Oppenheim’s portrait is a true masterpiece from the EFG Art Collection that reveals the sorrowful, solemn and authoritative side of one of the most iconic “surrealist” women. It is no coincidence that EFG, a bank with strong roots in Italian-speaking Switzerland, has this image of the artistic pioneer, model and muse in its collection. With war looming in Europe, Meret Oppenheim left Paris in 1937 and moved to Basel. Her family had already moved back to Casa Constanza, a large ramshackle house in the village of Carona, outside Lugano, that her maternal grandfather had bought in 1917. It was a period of intense doubt for Meret Oppenheim. Disconnected from the world of art, she recalled feeling “as if millennia of discrimination against women were resting on my shoulders, a deep-rooted feeling of inferiority.” However, Carona gave her respite from this. “In Carona, it was always August!” she explained.
Margrit Jäggli is said to have spent up to 300 hours on a single mirror painting. She was interested in the interplay between self-portrayal and the self, in other words, the way people behave when confronted with their own appearance in the mirror. Her work was never about provocation or the superficial reproduction of what she saw. Instead, its aim was the typification of human beings based on the observation of their different behaviours.
This article was published in the spring 2025 edition EFG’s InTalks magazine.