JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

‘Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin’ will be accompanied by a catalog from Hauser & Wirth Publishers, featuring a foreword by Bruno Bischofberger and a text by Dr. Dr. Dieter Buchhart to give visitors a unique insight into this specific chapter of one of the most important artists of the 20th Century. The exhibition is supported by Dr. Dr. Dieter Buchhart and Dr. Anna Karina Hofbauer, internationally renowned curators and Basquiat experts.

About the exhibition

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1960 and coming of age in the downtown, post-punk artistic scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Basquiat drew on the diversity and intensity of New York City within his multi-disciplinary practice. His expressive paintings combined bold text and imagery from his expansive references across art, film, history and music, as well as his experiences of everyday racism as a young Black man in the US.

After his first exhibition with Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in 1982, the same year Basquiat became one of the youngest ever artists to participate at Documenta in Kassel, the influences of the disparate cultural landscapes of New York City and Switzerland began to take shape in his work, incorporating the motifs of ski lifts, fir trees, mountains and German phrases into his expansive visual lexicon. ‘From then on, Jean-Michel Basquiat often visited me in Switzerland, where he particularly liked it. About half a dozen times in Zurich and exactly seven times in St. Moritz, four of them in the summer’, says Bischofberger. Basquiat was captivated by the Engadin’s vast natural landscape, cultural history and the hospitality of the Bischofberger family. Perhaps what drew Basquiat most to this part of Switzerland was, as Dr. Dr. Dieter Buchhart writes, ‘the contrast between the pulsating life, the clubs, the street noise, and the breakneck speed of the metropolis New York and the ‘discovery of slowness’ in the unique, overwhelming landscape of the Engadin.’