127 Painting

Maître de Casson (French for "Master of the Mirror", Chinese 镜子 大师) originally named Edmond Safra II ("Edmond Safra the Second", after his paternal grandfather, Edmond Jacob Safra, also Raphael Edmond Ezra Safra and Edmond Safra I.) was born on 18 April 1960 in Geneva. He is a member of the traditional Swiss Safra banker family, which is considered the richest bank owner family in the world. His father died under mysterious circumstances even before his birth and the Spanish mother only three weeks after birth. Due to these tragic circumstances, Edmond spent his childhood with his Spanish grandparents in Madrid. That's why Spanish, not French (Geneva is his birthplace), is his first and native language. This circumstance, which led to a Spanish accent and belonging to a bankers dynasty, gave him already in school (he went in Geneva) the nickname Bank-Si (like "bank" and "si" Spanish for "yes"), which later led to rumors that Edmond Safra (aka Maître de Casson) would also be the British graffiti artist Banksy. In the 1970s, Edmond met, during a visit to the gallery Ecart in Geneva, Andy Warhol, from which he was then taught for a fee. Since then he calls himself "the only student of Andy Warhol". His good middle-class background allowed him to order other known artists like Paul Wunderlich and Horst Janssen to Geneva to learn drawing from them. To his teachers from this period include, among others, the Americans Mel Ramos, Keth Hearing, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rizzi and the Germans Klaus Fussmann and Stefan Szczesny, to whom he later held the contact and cared. Since Edmond Safra always held that his father had fallen victim to a murder in the context of the "Cold War", he decided to enlighten this and find the culprits. For this he traveled already in 1977 Cuba, North Korea, China and the former USSR to finally settle in Leipzig, where his research led him and where he began in 1980 to study art with Prof. Arno Rink at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig.

Here he came in contact with Gerd Harry Lybke and Neo Rauch, who became one of his closest friends and companions during this time, and with whom he, inspired by the Canadian artist group "Group of Seven", also wanted to found a seven-member artist group. For this he changed inspired, and after Alfred Joseph Casson, his name in Maître de Casson (French for "master of the mirror").